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Project Management For Programmers?
welshdave asks: "I'm a senior web developer in a medium sized company where the project managers have no programming experience of any sort. I'm of the opinion that project managers should understand the projects that they're managing and want to move into project management myself. I'm aware that I may meet resistance from the current project managers - many of them have been hired with no previous experience of anything. Previous suggestions to senior management that myself and other developers would feel better with a technical person running projects have been dismissed. As a result we are routinely told to skip testing or to implement the impossible, with an emphasis on how things look rather than how well things actually work. Has anyone else found the barrier to project management is their technical knowledge. How did you get past it?"
Sorry, but I think your project manager is completely right. People don't want programs that work correctly, they want programs that look good. Indeed, the "blue screen" would be much more popular if its design would be more appealing (users would try to crash the system as often as possible if blue screens were replaced by cool animations with a great sound).
Georg
"in turn they seemed more willing to listen to reason and help form a project timeline that was 1/2-way based on reality." :-("
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"suffering from being up to late working on a project
Sounds like you might need to butter up your Project Manager a bit more...
;-)
He became a project manager because, although he wasn't technical, he gave great face.
Is this some euphenism for oral sex I'm not familiar with?
Haven't you seen the TV commercials man!?!
Fred, what's the matter? We're only asking the impossible.
CDW's television commercials suggest that they can solve these impossible problems and make everything in your organization work like it should!
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Worst case: You get taken out (you're gonna leave anyway so you've got nothing to lose)
Actually, worst case would be: you get taken out, he quits, gets a giant severance package and follows you to your new job.
I disagree. How well can one manage a project if they don't understand the steps or the relative complexity of the steps involved? It reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon where PHB assigns Dilbert the task of designing a global client/server infrastructure. Time alotted: 6 minutes.