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Is Project Management Killing Good Products, Teams and Software? (techbeacon.com)
New submitter mikeatTB writes: "For software development, no significant developer activity is predictable or repetitive; if it were, the developers would have automated it already," writes Steven A. Lowe, Principal Consultant Developer at ThoughtWorks, via TechBeacon. "In addition, learning is essentially a nonlinear process; it involves trying things that don't work in order to discover what does work. You might see linear progress for a while, but you don't know what you don't know, so there will be apparent setbacks. It is from these setbacks that one learns the truth about the system -- what is really needed to make it work, to make it usable, and to make a difference for the users and the business. In other words, the dirty little secret of software development is that projects don't really exist. And they're killing our products, teams, and software." Lowe continues: "Projects, with respect to software development, are imaginary boxes drawn around scope and time in an attempt to 'manage' things. This tendency is understandable, given the long fascination with so-called scientific management (a.k.a. Taylorism, a.k.a. Theory X), but these imaginary boxes do not reduce underlying complexity. On the contrary, they add unnecessary complexity and friction and invite a counterproductive temptation to focus on the box instead of the problem or product. This misplaced emphasis leads to some harmful delusions: Conformance to schedule is the same thing as success; Estimation accuracy is possible and desirable enough to measure and optimize for; The plan is perfect and guarantees success; The cost of forming and dissolving teams is zero; The cost of functional silo hand-offs is zero; The bigger and more comprehensive the plan, the better; Predictability and efficiency are paramount."
To quote Dwight D. Eisenhower, "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable."
If you go into a major project without some sort of project management, it's not going to end well. However, the management of the project needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the changing environment. Decent project management will see when things are under resourced, and help to fill in those gaps (if possible), and should keep the project going in the right direction.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Some supervision is required, but I know the project I'm working on right now would be better off if we fired everyone between Sr. Director and SVP (half the Directors too!).
1. project managers that graduated from the school of flagellation. the ones that think assigning a firm date to every goal is the only way to ensure it gets completed, and are willing to waterboard you for not adhering to the holy calendar. some of what we do in systems engineering -- like deprecating old systems or rolling out your cloud provided buzzgasm solution -- is highly technical. if you're not willing to draw diagrams or at least document how and why we arrived at some of these goals, youre just another manager.
2. project managers that ignore dependencies. sometimes other teams need to get involved to accomplish a given task or objective and if youre not willing to make the call, then who is? securing time from the beleaguered network guy, the storage zombies, or the NOC is technically under your purvey. if we make it all the way to the calendars release date and you havent done the needful when it comes to taking to other teams and understanding the business structure, then we can hardly be blamed.
3. companies that insist on contract-based project managers. they arent around long enough to learn the business or the systems in place, so they have very little incentive to participate fully in the project lifecycle. these shitlords get away with floating from company to company and doing very little at all.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks.
This should be required reading once a year for ALL direct and indirect management of any engineering or software development team.
Again with the "Oh, Look at what I found, managing complex tasks is hard!" How many times will we be blessed with the same insight that Mr. Brooks put on paper way back in the 1970's? My guess is "just once more!"
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I've been around for a number of years in the dev trade. I've seen good and bad projects. When project management is done well it makes a world of difference. Everyone knows what needs to be done without needing three meetings a week just to figure out who is working on what. The deliverables get clearly defined, and change management is enshrined and accounted for. Working in this environment is awesome. Now, do project management badly and your project WILL be over budget and over schedule. Nobody will be happy and it will be a crap job. Nobody will be especially clear what the deliverables are because change management is not accounted for and you have moving targets. The team spends more time finding who to blame than just fixing the problem. My opinion - if you are using the wrong tools, you'll have wrong project management. (i.e. Asana is a task tracker, not an asset manager, resource planner, time log, or credential manager... Task tracking is only part of the equation).
Usually... The goal is to avoid getting "management to help" you with your project, because their favorite tool for a late project is to throw resources at it and ask you for time wasting progress reports.
Attention, All, Attention. Because this project is behind schedule we will be requiring hourly status reports, unless status improves!
Fredrick Brooks was right.... There is no silver bullet (unless you bring your own from home).
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Project mis-managers make nice pretty Gantt charts to show the C-suite, but try to actually use them to plan and manage a project. Gantt and PERT were developed as REPORTING visuals during the Polaris missile program to show Congress how things were working. I got a degree in Industrial and Systems engineering before being seduced by computers and during my entire career I never saw any Project Manager that understood that. What's worse they would pull times for task completion out of somewhere the sun never shone.
At one time I was over a group that did final post production QA on in house programs. The project manager allocated a week for the QA testing of the entire system and I told him that it would take at least four and maybe six weeks. I had no input to the original time allocated. On the very first day of testing I was able to find enough problems that when I wrote them up and turned them over to the project manager that day he turned blue. It was at least three weeks work before he was able to get those fixed and give us another shot at testing. Final outcome was that we were right at the six week point before we were able to report the system clean enough to use.
Coordination is required. Cutting the red tape is required. Supervision is not.
Management should finally find out that they're a supporting role to those that produce instead of going on a micromanaging power trip.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And this is what's wrong. Most of those managers could easily be replaced by a Magic-8-ball.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There are very, very few project managers that are actually not detrimental to the production process. And a tiny subset of those is actually helpful. I'm blessed with some of this category (and yes, they cost more than minimum wage... quite a bit more).
The best project managers know that their job is to keep the spice flowing and to give their engineers what they need to be productive. They know how to requisition resources at the right time and in the right amount for the right people from the right source.
These people are rare. If you ever run across one, don't let them go!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is that upper management doesn't understand that status reports have a non-zero, non-trivial cost. When a project gets into trouble, the number of status reports and meetings increase, which surprise surprise, slows down progress. Also, software development is non-linear for at least part of any non trivial project. Refusing to accept that fact has caused problems for decades. Sometimes as a developer, it feels like management is working against us. Does any of that sound like a useful part of running the business?
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Project Management isn't suited for Product development.
Most project management methods are based on some fallacies.
1. The users of the product knows what they want: The truth is they don't know what they want until they can get their hands on it, and know if what they see if they like it, hate it, or have a some tweaks that are needed. No matter how many meetings you have with static pictures and blueprints. The user just doesn't know what they want until they can get their hands on it.
2. Development of modules have a start time and a complete time: Function X may take 2 days to develop. Because it is prerequisite for function Y. However after function Y is completed and used function Z, You need to go back to function X, to get the data prepped for function Z, but you couldn't put that code in for function Z support until you have completed function Y which needed X. Coding isn't linear, they are parts that needs to be addressed and fixed, causing other parts to be reworked or adjusted.
3. People are interchangeable: A coder is a coder right. Well no. Some of them are really good at doing Database calls, while others are most comfortable with the HTML and JavaScript. While there is an other one who is most comfortable with the Middle tier code. Sure all of them may be able to code all the parts if needed, but for the most part each ones is going to be a specialist in particular parts. This means not all people are used qually or performing each task as efficiently as someone else.
4. People have lives outside the project: While working most people may get called to take a look at a different project (bug fix a previous completed application) they may need to sit in a meeting for a future project. Also they can get sick, have family emergencies...
5. Coders just code uniformly: There is a degree of artistic pride every coder uses. Everyone will approach problems a bit differently, they may be arguing with the Architect for them to be doing something a particular way or they will just ignore, misinterpret, the internal parts of the spec, and just make sure the output meets the specs. So this often creates some conflict because the internal changes may affect something else (timing, system resource, readability...) So we may need to redo the function, or just adapt the rest of the stuff around these changes.
Most PM policies are based on manufacturing processes. Where the goal matches the outcome. Product Development the outcome is usually different then the initial goal.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"The bigger and more comprehensive the plan, the better"
The plan that is genuinely comprehensive enough can just be compiled and shipped as the software product, no?
Take each task estimate... add 50% and turn the date into management.
Track time estimates, and the 50% slop on top of it. If 1/2 way through the project you have gone through 3/4 of your slop time, you already know you aren't going to make it. If you have only gone through 1/3 of your slop there is a good chance you might actually make it by the 150% time.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
There's the stupid saying that I'm sure we've all heard, "A bad craftsman always blames his tools!". The reality, though, is that some tools are just fucking awful, no matter who is using them. Even in the hands of the best expert to have ever existed there are tools that won't work well at all.
We see that happening with software development. As we've seen more shitty tools like Ruby, JavaScript and even Rust be used, we've seen software quality decline steeply. Such software is often slow. It's bloated. It's hard to maintain. It's just an awful experience for users and programmers alike.
Rust is perhaps the epitome of this phenomenon. In my opinion it takes the worst aspects of the major programming languages, adds in confusion, adds in hype, and the results are a stunning disappointment. Look at how little has been accomplished on Servo, a new web browser engine specifically written in Rust. I've been tracking its progress for a couple of years now, and it's very underachieving, I think. I'd say it's no better than a late-1990s era browser engine, and in some ways it's worse.
I wish we'd see programmers go back to the days of using languages like C, C++, and Delphi. At least that software worked well, it performed well, it was usable, and allowed developers to create and maintain the software within reasonable time frames. It's a far cry from the JavaScript or Ruby projects we see today that deliver a crappy user experience, and it takes the programmers forever just to get something built.
I first hit this in the 80's. Our company was the first to use microprocessors to replace walls of computers with boxes maybe 3 cubic feet (1x1x3), that by the way did 10 times the work the walls of computers did.
One quarter the defense budget got cut and we went from growing 40% to 20%. 20% growth sounds good to you and me. But to the bean counters it was a layoff. That got the expected profits for the quarter back in line at the expense of future growth and morale.
I have to admit, that first layoff got rid of a lot of deadwood. But the second, third, and fourth really killed the company. Those that were either marginal, or not good at politics, got canned. Those that were good at their jobs looked around, said "um, how about no", and left.
I got hit in the 4th layoff, and only got laid off again once since I learned the signs. The second time was a start up failing, I hadn't yet learned how to read a balance sheet.
MBAs don't understand the morale hit they take when they do a layoff. They may say they do, but they don't. I've survived several layoffs, each time morale went to hell and a lot of good people went searching for more stable pastures.
Wow. So much to say on this I don't know where to start. In embedded system development, where you are co-developing HW/FW/SW, there is such a mismatch between worlds that I've yet to see a good way to manage it. HW often has three+ month iteration cycles so it is a complete mismatch with software cycles. The only PM magic I've seen is Design Reviews Up Front (DRUP). For example, after the HW folks have rough block diagrams done in the first week or two, have a deep design review with ALL parties (ME/FW/SW/Mfg/Buyers/Service/etc) BEFORE they start detailed schematic design then have another DRUP before layout. This is the closest thing I've seen to continuous integration in embedded systems. Far too often I've seen the EEs show up for the only design review with finished schematics three days late for sending it to layout only to hear from the FW or SW team that the CPU they've chosen will not work. Of course by then it is too late then to fix the problem. The SW team is usually off developing on an overpowered development board (or worse, PCs) that has no relation to the real target so the SW will never fit the real product. The other big review fail I've seen is only inviting your discipline to your design review (eg., only EEs to HW). Inviting only your tribe to only a final review is only an exercise in "how can our tribe improve for next time," not a way to improve this product. I still do run things scrummy, but tend to be very lax on estimates, etc.
My best (former) manager (I was developing Oracle software for a State agency) said that his number one job was to be an umbrella to keep the shit from falling on us and distracting us
When I became a software development manager, I saw my number one job as keeping the developers from being drug off into endless project meetings and being kept away from doing their work.
SCRUM was my favorite tool, with the daily standup and pre/post sprints meetings were my source for all information to deliver back to the project manager(s).
Project management can be applied to software development, BUT clueless fucking PM's who think that their #1 job is keeping everybody scheduled for project status meetings are going to blow the whole deal.
I'm continually surprised at all the things we learned about engineering software systems that don't get applied back into management.
We know throwing threads at a problem doesn't work if all you do is end up locking everything. We know that high coupling and low cohesion leads to irreducible complexity. Sharing mutable state instead of doing a little bit of analysis to see what the dependencies are and break down tasks to minimize the reach of these dependencies.
Yet somehow, all these lessons from concrete experience (rather than abstract theory) gets thrown out the door in project management, even from managers who were once software engineers. Project management should be there to facilitate message passing and work stealing queues without trying to force when these things happen.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
If the project is feasible, good developers will get it done regardless of or even despite the plan. The vast majoity of plans have problems because they want a man-year's worth of code from three months of work, which means it was never a good plan. But poor project management can turn a bad plan into a disaster by refusing to acknowledge the delay. I've been in meeting that pretty much involved badgering the developers until our estimates said we'd deliver. Oddly enough those "revised" estimates never came true...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Indeed, while poorly done planning is useless, or worse, PROPER planning can be VERY useful.
Here's a very important fact - programmers consistently over-estimate how much they can get done in a week or a month. Consistently, that's the key word. We're wrong about how long things will take, but we're wrong in a fairly predictable way. If tasks are well defined, programmers are pretty good at estimating the RELATIVE size of job - task A will likely take about twice as long as task B. Here's what the planned productivity vs actual completed tasks might look like for a typical Agile team, with the amount done measured in "story points":
Sprint #. Plan Actual completed
Sprint 1. 124 98
Sprint 2. 105 96
Sprint 3. 131 102
Sprint 4. 116 97
The team fell short of their plan every time. And they pretty consistently get about 98 points. If management believes the 131 number, there will be problems. It works pretty well if management looks at historical fact and says "this team completes about 98 points per sprint. Let's do the project plan based on 85 points total for the team."
Let's address the "delusions" (straw men) that the author sets up:
> The plan is perfect and guarantees success;
Perfection is not required for something to be valuable. The author's proposal is even LESS perfect. While a plan can't guarantee success, it does at least define success, so you know when you're done, and what you're aiming for. Failing to plan, on the other hand, almost guarantees perpetual scope-creep, where a project can never be a success because it never ends.
> The cost of forming and dissolving teams is zero;
Very often the cost of forming a team is WORTH IT
> The cost of functional silo hand-offs is zero;
Again, not zero, but worth it
> The bigger and more comprehensive the plan, the better;
If you don't have a big-picture plan of what your company or organization is trying to do, what are the odds that you'll accidentally accomplish it?
More specifically, what often happens without a big-picture plan is that functional level teams such as programmers do cool stuff that gets abandoned shortly afterward. They may spend a month integrating the systems of a division that gets sold off two months later. They may do cool stuff for managing desktop applications, while another team is busily moving everything to the cloud.
> Predictability and efficiency are paramount.
Your idea for what you want your team to do sounds good. My different idea sounds good. So does Kevin's idea. Unless we find a way to predict how long these projects will take, WE DON'T KNOW IF WE SHOULD DO THEM AT ALL. There are many, many projects that should be done if we can do them this week, and should not be done if it'll take a year. Yes, predictability *is* important. At a much higher level, the executives at your young, growing company are borrowing millions of dollars to fund the company until it becomes profitable. Those loans start coming due in three years. Yes, for a young company, it's very survival depends on predicting how long these will take and how much they will cost. Predicting is hard (though certain methods make it much easier), but it's essential.
Whoa man all the cool hip project managers Agile development as it solves 100% of the problems 100% of the time. It makes you grow a beard and transports you to a hipster Silicon Valley coffee shop with music playing that hasn't even been written yet complete with groupies watching you code.
http://saveie6.com/
project managers that graduated from the school of flagellation
I've encountered one that it even worse: the Golgafrincham B ark school of project management where you have to hire a business consultant to go around and make sure that the project really is what we need and, after that, to ask whether the proposed solution will satisfy everyone, and after that to... etc. although it did not get quite as far as involving telephone sanitizers. The result was that what should have been a simple one or two month project took over two years, much of which was pointless and endless consultation to learn what we already knew and it delivered something less useful than it should have been because everyone just wanted it to be over.
So really bad project management not only kills a good product it can almost kill your will to live!
The difference between an effective and ineffective PM is astounding in most places I've worked. On one end you have a forceful PM who will beat up their resources and harass their managers until the work is done. On the other are the PMPs clinging for dear life to their copy of the PMBOK who are unable to get anyone to do what they want.
You can tell a PM isn't so great when you hear the exact same phrases and jargon repeated in the exact same order on endless conference calls. [1] I'm not saying it's easy either...I could never do that job because I can't coerce people to do what needs to be done. And when it comes down to it, that's a PM's only job...well, that and checking the boxes and filling out Gantt charts.
[1] I swear that one PM I worked with would say "Good morning, who just joined the call?" in the EXACT same tone, rhythm and texture at the sound of every beep on conference calls. It was like a machine!
My favourite manager (now retired) had the same philosophy. You'll find a similar theme amongst most people's favourite bosses.
He was an ex-Army (AU) warrant officer and wouldn't hesitate to rip you up like a drill sergeant if it was your fault, but equally wouldn't hesitate to throw it back upstairs if it were a problem with senior management or sales. If any customers were being unreasonable with his engineers, he'd practically teleport to site, sit everyone down, look the customer in the eye and calmly ask them what their business case was for being difficult with a vendor.
He also had a mostly hands-off PM style, he'd just bump into people during breaks at random points, ask a couple of questions, move on. Ask him where the pieces of project were at and he could list them off like a human Gantt chart just based on those queries. But woe betide you if you didn't inform him of any looming problems before they became serious, or if you tried to push blame away. If you came to him with a blunt statement along the lines of "I fucked up, here's the issue, I think this could solve it", he'd bend over backwards to get it sorted.
I've since tried to model my own management style after his - definitely not as successfully.
On anything with more than 5-6 people on a team, a project manager is a necessity. It is inefficient in first-order terms, but keeping people focused on what they are good at (and a dedicated person managing scope) dramatically improves productivity. Generally, less than 10% of hours should be in project management.
Bad project management is a different beast. Bad project managers add needless complexity, waste time, and draw focus to aspects of the project that participants cannot control.
They're trying to reduce everything to statistics and numbers, like Robert McNamara did in Vietnam.
It's trying to make sense of something they don't really understand - the human element. The chaos. Motivation. Leadership. Ability.
"If you can't measure what's important, what you can measure becomes important."
In an agile team using Kanban, for example, there is no “project” at all—there’s only a continuous stream of value-delivering work, prioritized by someone who keeps a finger on the pulse of the customer and validated with actual customers.
Yes, we use Kanban, and we deliver a continuous stream of value-delivering work, prioritized. However, the prioritization did not come from someone but an entity of 3, composing of the Project Manager, Product Manager and the Product Owner. These 3 negotiate the best strategy forward, cater all the late changes, factor in the available resources, and keep eyes on the deadline. Yes, there is always a deadline, like it or not. A company with sustainable business have to release a new product when it is still perceived to be valuable to the market, not after.
Project Management has one key role in all the developments - to manage the resources. A development has only finite resource, be it money, people, space, time, equipment, or skillsets. It is obvious that it is not someone who keeps a finger on the pulse of the customer and validated with actual customers who is managing these. Bad Project Management skill can of course get in the way, but so as Bad *. That we should never use these examples to mislead the reader into thinking because some people do not qualify for their roles means those roles are not essential or better off without.
the most obvious being the assumption that it is possible to deliver quality and completeness by the deadline
OMG! This is 21st century and who on earth would still assume this!? No, everyone knows this is not possible, and that's why Project Management work so hard to ensure in advance the necessary resources are in place when needed so that the critical components are ready with an acceptable quality by the deadline.
Focusing on projects can also compromise architectural integrity. For example ...
I don't see why it has to be the case. A well planned project executed by competent people would not draw anything like the example given in the article. Again, we should never use these examples to mislead the reader into thinking something is not needed because of these bad outcomes where the actual reasons lies somewhere else.
Product Centric development does not exclude management of resources nor people. Product Centric development (or rather Value Centric Product Development) focus on business value but business value also tied tightly to the market, thus time, and delivery of value requires resources and therefore management. You can dissolve these functionalities into your team and call them whatever you like, but the role of Project Management is still there and needed, unless the available resources are infinite relative to your development needs. Then may be you should try a bigger development project?
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No sic due to sic called a sic leave today, said it's sic.