Techie Project Management

As well as all the other malarkey going on this week at work, the project manager who joined us at the start of June upped and quit. No notice, no information, just a letter saying “I’ve had enough, I’m not coming back”. Which was, to be frank, a bit of a surprise. Not an entirely unpleasant surprise, as she wasn’t best liked (and not just by me) but all the same, I don’t think any of us expected her to just up and leave.

Anyway, it made me think a bit more about the way companies and managers see their techies and developers, and particularly the way they manage them when it comes to projects, timetables, targets and the like. I was also kind of inspired (or at least the article made me think) by Positive Sharing’s “How Not To Lead Geeks“, which made an awful lot of sense when I read it.

I think most managers see techies as unruly, chaotic, and not really all that organised. Which is kind of amusing, when you think about the fact that most of us are based in logical processes, and deal with natural progressions and information flows every day. In fact, I think the real mind-block for most managers is in seeing that actually, we’re creative. We get a brief that says “we want a website that does x,y and z. Go away and do it.” Sometimes – as is my case with the current workplace – the entire brief is “We want a social network website. We don’t really know what one is, but we want one. Make it.” And that’s what I’ve done – and it’s bloody good, in general. Or was, ’til Arsehole Boss got his grubby mitts on it. But that’s another story.

So yes, in many ways techies and developers are actually creative. Yet most managers appear to see us as minions, people who need to be micro-managed, people who don’t have a creative thought in their bodies, because, well, they’re techies. They use computers. They don’t draw, or paint, or design clothes, or write. Well, write is the closest to what they do. But you get the idea – in the minds of these managers, techies aren’t creative, they need to be guided every inch of the way, even when (or perhaps particularly when) those managers don’t actually have the knowledge themselves.

So you end up in a project where everything is being counted, every day is set out in an order of micro-modules, with goals, achievements, chokepoints, setbacks, the lot. And I’ve yet to meet any techie – in fact, any creative type at all – who likes being micro-managed in that way, and who doesn’t kick back against it in as many ways as possible.

What techies actually need when it comes to management, and Project Management in particular, is to have someone who says “OK, this is what we need. You’ve got x weeks to do it. This is what it must do.”, and then maybe once or twice a week comes round to the developers, sits down and says “How’s it going? Anything I need to know? Are we still on target? Any problems?” and then keeps track of the project in that way.

We don’t need Gantt charts, timelines, task lists, analysis, checklists, test plans, Microsoft Project, or any of that. We just need to be allowed to do what we’re good at, and to have someone who can communicate that process up the line to meetings etc.

Really it’s a simple answer. Maybe I’m simplifying it a bit, I don’t know. What I do know is that I’ve only ever worked with one PM who could work like that, and it was also the only project I’ve worked on where all the techies were happy and motivated – and prepared to put in the extra hours if necessary-, and where the project came in early, under-budget, and with no problems at all.

So maybe it’s micro-management that kills creativity, and destroys projects more than anything else.