Can't stand list managers. Give me mature developers, architects, product managers, and jira. If someone wants to help take notes, that's fine. But dont confuse that with leadership.
The Good Project Manager
11–20 of 26 posts
Re: The Good Project Manager
#12After reading Waltzing with Bears I really think that any discussion of Project Management that doesn't focus on risk management at all is incomplete. It's important to make an honest list of all the risks to your projects and the estimated probability of each of those occurring, identify what will be the indicator that a risk is materializing, and have a plan of action for preventing or mitigating each risk. The project schedule must build risk factors into the calculation.
Re: The Good Project Manager
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is important. The idea that some sort of methodological silver bullet exists that will solve your projects problems "for you" is as pervasive as it is naive. A big part of a good PM's role is knowing what approach is appropriate for which project(s) and knowing how to implement it practically with the team(s) they have.
You've just described "individuals and interactions over processes and procedures". The agile manifesto isn't the cluster fuck that Agile has become. Agile methodologies directly violate the agile philosophy, but that's no reason to pretend that we're just now discovering that methodologies suck. It's in the manifesto.
What I've described are ideas that predate the agile manifesto, and are not subsumed by it.
Re: The Good Project Manager
#14After reading Waltzing with Bears I really think that any discussion of Project Management that doesn't focus on risk management at all is incomplete. It's important to make an honest list of all the risks to your projects and the estimated probability of each of those occurring, identify what will be the indicator that a risk is materializing, and have a plan of action for preventing or mitigating each risk. The pro…
And recognize or communicate uncertainty. Too often I think that people like to brush uncertainty under the carpet, and then forget that their nice clean plan is just one of many possible outcomes.
Re: The Good Project Manager
#15Can't stand list managers. Give me mature developers, architects, product managers, and jira. If someone wants to help take notes, that's fine. But dont confuse that with leadership.
To me this just shows a misunderstanding of what project management is (and is not). Good PMs do to a certain extent manage a list of tasks, dates, and features. But it's a small part of what they do.
And just because a lot of us would rather not spend half the day emailing C-level folks in our organization does not mean that it's not important.
Re: The Good Project Manager
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Re: The Good Project Manager
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Re: The Good Project Manager
#19After reading Waltzing with Bears I really think that any discussion of Project Management that doesn't focus on risk management at all is incomplete. It's important to make an honest list of all the risks to your projects and the estimated probability of each of those occurring, identify what will be the indicator that a risk is materializing, and have a plan of action for preventing or mitigating each risk. The pro…
And recognize or communicate uncertainty. Too often I think that people like to brush uncertainty under the carpet, and then forget that their nice clean plan is just one of many possible outcomes.
That and understanding the relationship between risk, uncertainty and reward. If a project is not risky at all, there is probably no reward to doing it either. Risks contribute uncertainty to the schedule, so both the probability of those risks materializing and the time and monetary costs of mitigating those risks must be factored into the schedule and budget.
Re: The Good Project Manager
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is important. The idea that some sort of methodological silver bullet exists that will solve your projects problems "for you" is as pervasive as it is naive. A big part of a good PM's role is knowing what approach is appropriate for which project(s) and knowing how to implement it practically with the team(s) they have.
You've just described "individuals and interactions over processes and procedures". The agile manifesto isn't the cluster fuck that Agile has become. Agile methodologies directly violate the agile philosophy, but that's no reason to pretend that we're just now discovering that methodologies suck. It's in the manifesto.
The difficult part of being a good PM in a team is that Agile is hard to do right with real humans. Even if it can be reduced to the Agile Manifesto, putting it in practice is difficult and takes work, time, and skill. The ability to consistently create good practices are what differentiates the good from bad PMs.
So while I agree with you that it does reduce to the Agile Manifesto, I'd also say that from a PM's perspective, that's not the point.