Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How To Gently Keep Management From Wrecking a Project?
New submitter miserly_content writes "I work in a large, hierarchical technology company. I have been developing technical specs for a new strategic and challenging software project, and the project is slowly gathering steam and support. This is already a career building success for me, and everyone acknowledges my technical capabilities. But the program manager is an MBA-type, and wants to bring in new multiple team leaders and consultants. This is not really a surprise, but I feel we are sliding towards a too-many-chiefs-too-few-indians scenario, especially at this early stage. How can I pitch upper management about this issue, without appearing selfish or disruptive? What positive approach can I try with the PM, with whom I have a good working relationship?"
Insist on a one person reporting structure. The moment you are reporting to more that one person all is lost as each then is competing for your time and will try to shove in more features or reporting demand than the other.
Years ago I was happily working on a project where I basically dealt with the client. But our QA department just lost a big contract and saw my good sized budget and weaseled in. The head of the QA department did his damnedest to get more and more people onto the project and then started communicating with the client which somehow was being then communicated to me as we need more testing. So after a few weeks I was having to deal with 5 QA people, a QA manager, and the client. Productivity dropped like a stone. So I met on the side with the client who demanded that they approve any billable time for any employee ahead of time. So the QA manager would send in a huge complicated (30 pages) request for this and that and the client would send back a note, "At this time I will only accept billable time on programming, at the end of the project we will re-examine the need for QA." Then the next time the QA manager phoned him he answered the call with, "the time on this call had better not be billable."
A week later the QA manager had an all-hands-onboard management meeting where he demanded that all projects have a set minimum percentage of QA. This failed and he then layed off half of his QA staff.
The best part of all this is that I made some good money. The QA Manager was hired by a huge tech company (2000 bubble) and I played the options market to basically short the crap out of that company as he had been hired for a very senior position and my logic was that any company that could not filter out this waste product was doomed. Their share price went from $120 to around $10 in a couple of months and he basically moved there and was then laid off.
So insist on a single reporting person which will then result in your MBA type having to stack his MBA underling on top of you. This will be so obviously silly that it is doomed. If you do end up reporting to more than one person get the resume cooking as the stress of reporting to more than one person on a project is just not worth it. If you have 3 MBA types all piling on with their own perverse desires(TPA reports) then they will each demand 40 plust hours of work from you per week so either you will die trying to feed their stupid requests or you will fail and they will all sabotage you as they will need someone to blame and they are higher up the information food chain than you.
Amen. Read Voltaire's Bastards. I read it when it came out in the 90's, and over time I have become increasingly convinced of its accuracy. In essence, MBA's and their simplistic ideologies are driving our civilization into the ground.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I got my boss fired for incompetence. But it was the week after I left, so only benefitted my coworkers.
He was an incompetent jerk, to the point where the other managers refused to even talk to him. He screwed me out of a company-wide benefit ("summer hours"; half day off per week during summer) for no reason I could discern. He was so bad, if we passed in the hallway and he said "Hello", I would follow it up with an email explaining what happened so he couldn't lie about it later.
I put up with it as long as I could, and then I quit. At my exit interview, I calmly explained what had happened, and asked them not to take my word, but to ask everyone else about it.
Less than a week later, they fired him. The guard escorted him out, and someone else packed up his things to ship to him.
The best part was that my former coworkers had a going-away party in his honor (to which I was invited), but they didn't invite him.