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Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#31

Post by steveBK123 »

crispyambulance wrote: post #26
smeej wrote: post #4

I tend to interpret this as a sure sign of a manager who secretly knows they're useless. If you're the manager, your job isn't to do my work. Your job is to optimize my (and the rest of the team's) ability to do our own work. If I've missed something that should be part of a procedure, that should be in a checklist I should have reviewed before submitting my work. You shouldn't have to tell me to tweak it. If I'm han…

Things change all the time. People, including managers, are human and specs aren't something that always can be "carved in stone" in advance and carried out to perfection. There certainly are pathological situations where people really do need to leave a mark and that's why "the duck" technique that Rachel described works. This pops up in presentations too. Sometimes you know in advance that your presentation is goin…

Sometimes the purpose of those decks is really just to get stakeholders to think out loud and express what they actually want. A lot of these execs seem incapable of doing so without being shown something they don't want first.

So often theres no reason for a deck to be more than 3 slides because it will immediately derail and turn into an airing of actual needs.

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#33

Post by sokoloff »

crispyambulance wrote: post #26
smeej wrote: post #4

I tend to interpret this as a sure sign of a manager who secretly knows they're useless. If you're the manager, your job isn't to do my work. Your job is to optimize my (and the rest of the team's) ability to do our own work. If I've missed something that should be part of a procedure, that should be in a checklist I should have reviewed before submitting my work. You shouldn't have to tell me to tweak it. If I'm han…

Things change all the time. People, including managers, are human and specs aren't something that always can be "carved in stone" in advance and carried out to perfection. There certainly are pathological situations where people really do need to leave a mark and that's why "the duck" technique that Rachel described works. This pops up in presentations too. Sometimes you know in advance that your presentation is goin…

A tip for presentations: in presentation mode in both Powerpoint and Slides, if you type the slide number and press enter, the presentation will jump to that slide.

If you have notes about which auxiliary slide is relevant to which persnickety comment/topic, you can seamlessly warp to it and it hits harder/makes you look more prepared/polished than a bunch of page up/down and "I know it's here somewhere" filler speech.

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#34

Post by steveBK123 »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #21

I think we can be a bit less cynical about this behaviour, at least in some cases. Perhaps a fresh pair of eyes is always going to notice a bunch of potential changes, which would improve things from their subjective point of view. But humans are notoriously bad at absolute scales (see Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman) so it's hard for us to decide "I can see a bunch of issues but they're all below the thres…

I think that's a really great way to put it, but also not something the majority of leaders (or people in general) are capable of. Nothing is ever perfect, everyone has a different opinion/view, at some point you need to wrap up a work product and move on.

I found with a former manager the creation of project plans was absolutely hell because of this. Arguably project plans are not something directly deliverable to a stakeholder or with a firm deadline. Sort of like politics in academia, the lower the stakes the worst the battles.

So he would spin through 20 iterations of expressing his discontents with the current plan.

Typical feedback was what he didn't like / was wrong, rather than what he actually desired to see. Sort of like a very hands off editor who doesn't want to write the book for the author.

Often times midway through he would be Don Quixote'ing items in the plan that were added because of his earlier feedback.

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#35

Post by morkalork »

miroljub wrote: post #10
preinheimer wrote: post #7

I used to live in Montreal. Cabs there need to get a safety inspection like every 6 months. Talking to some cab drivers there, many of them remarked that the people doing the safety exam -had- to find something. Your car could have been fresh from the mechanic, they’d find something to complain about. So, starting about 6 weeks out from their next safety, if something went wrong but the car was still drivable, they w…

Another example of "what you measure is what you get".

And because they keep finding those obviously wrong things, the program justifies itself!

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#36

Post by a_c »

The flip side is equally true. People don't usually internalise suggestion at face value unless they are in the right situational mindset. For example, telling your colleague directly that making a smaller pull request would make the review process easier may fallen to deaf ears. But someday, maybe having reviewed other colleague's PR, or maybe reading a blog of a famous professional, the same colleague may suggest back to you the very same thing you suggested 3 months ago.

There is nothing wrong people giving suggestion or opinion. It takes taste to discern which suggestion has merit. And it take experience to build up taste

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#37

Post by steveBK123 »

smeej wrote: post #4

I tend to interpret this as a sure sign of a manager who secretly knows they're useless. If you're the manager, your job isn't to do my work. Your job is to optimize my (and the rest of the team's) ability to do our own work. If I've missed something that should be part of a procedure, that should be in a checklist I should have reviewed before submitting my work. You shouldn't have to tell me to tweak it. If I'm han…

Yes, I've worked for a couple guys in my career like this. Typically they would bet absolutely unhinged about things like grammar in emails, code style, PR nitpicks, or how the teams wiki looked.. while having no actual input on the teams user facing work product .

It's a good way to demotivate the team into slowing down the trains.

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#39

Post by mathattack »

sokoloff wrote: post #30
brightball wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my earliest bosses was the main web developer for a telco's marketing department. He would get everything working and ready the way that it needed to be, then prior to showing it to marketing would change something to be clearly wrong. In my example, he just put a red line down the middle of one section that looked out of place. Marketing would review it and say, "Everything looks good, let's just change that…

The 2007-02-02 Dilbert applies: https://assets.amuniversal.com/9df021106cc801301d50001dd8b71...

And Scott Adams also previously worked at a Telco.

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#40

Post by moate »

steveBK123 wrote: post #34
quietbritishjim wrote: post #21

I think we can be a bit less cynical about this behaviour, at least in some cases. Perhaps a fresh pair of eyes is always going to notice a bunch of potential changes, which would improve things from their subjective point of view. But humans are notoriously bad at absolute scales (see Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman) so it's hard for us to decide "I can see a bunch of issues but they're all below the thres…

I think that's a really great way to put it, but also not something the majority of leaders (or people in general) are capable of. Nothing is ever perfect, everyone has a different opinion/view, at some point you need to wrap up a work product and move on. I found with a former manager the creation of project plans was absolutely hell because of this. Arguably project plans are not something directly deliverable to a…

>>Don Quixote'ing

I realize there is no way to say this without sounding like an absolute fucking dork, and this may be a syntaxial choice you're making, but the phrase is "tilting at windmills".

I regularly say "irregardlessly" because it's fun and I know better and if that's what you're doing here I love it and it's amazing, but if not you've got a new phrase in your kit.

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