Reply to: bane

[vetran]

Well someone had to prop up your contracting career didn't they

Actually in my first the client was really good at negotiation with the end customer very cushy if not exceptionally well paid. We did some really good stuff that impressed the manufacturer of the tech stack because he and the contractor manager backed us so we reduced support calls by about 90%. I would work with both the client and manager again any time.

The other 2 clients I won and did work for were direct and my contacts trusted me. One even used to buy me a bottle of scotch at Xmas.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Calm down! Calm down!

It's only an advert?

Who knew?

[northernladuk]

I have been lucky enough to work with plenty of great managers and PMs but they are the exception not the rule.

Well someone had to prop up your contracting career didn't they

[vetran]

I have been lucky enough to work with plenty of great managers and PMs but they are the exception not the rule.

A great manager / PM asks what is possible and is clever enough to know when you are lying. Ones who are ex techs can be good but frequently they aren't up to date.

When you say trust me and they do, you know they will back you.

[malvolio]

Similar to me but was more on the support and training side and just realised I am having to re-learn the tech over and over so got out. The interest in tech is still there though so the background helps. I've always wondered how people can jump straight in to a PM or service role can do the job with the interest/history in tech. But people do it and pretty well so must be possible.


Yes indeed but you would expect a PM to have enough of a clue to not think transition is done in the last two weeks of the project. Only happened once so not commonplace thankfully but was rather amusing at the time.

Not that rare. I walked away form one project when they expected me to work a full week on site (with my better half in hospital, just as an added complication) transitioning their 17 (!) migration projects into live use in the week before go live. Their lead PM had a go at my client, who backed up my position. The programme ran out for live use three months late....

[northernladuk]

To be fair, if you're going to do any kind of a good job in Service Management, especially in Architecture and Design roles, you'll have a pretty wide-ranging set of skills and knowledge. In my case I've got 15 years programming and 25 years in Service Management starting from basic operator on up, and switching to management when I realised I was on my sixth OS and 15th programming language (including variants).

Similar to me but was more on the support and training side and just realised I am having to re-learn the tech over and over so got out. The interest in tech is still there though so the background helps. I've always wondered how people can jump straight in to a PM or service role can do the job with the interest/history in tech. But people do it and pretty well so must be possible.

Most PMs aren't anywhere near that kind of background; a bit like politicians, they come up through a fairly narrow path and quite a few have very little real technical expertise at all.

Basically we need to be able to talk to people about their role in their language, be they IT, accounting, plaster board manufacturing, management or civil servant. They don't have to or expect to talk to us in ours.

Yes indeed but you would expect a PM to have enough of a clue to not think transition is done in the last two weeks of the project. Only happened once so not commonplace thankfully but was rather amusing at the time.

[malvolio]

I'd agree with this. PM'ing is so much more than techie. Planning, budgets, risk management, stakeholder management and so on that techies can't do and rarely understand. It does need someone that is tech savvy and pick up and get a basic understanding of the tech pretty quickly so they can use the right terminology without knowing detail tech knowledge. It's not just tech, we see the same issues in Service Management where PM's don't fully understand service intro and service ops but as long as they engage me at a reasonable level I don't expect them to know what I do in detail. Two gigs a go a PM approached me with a plan and asked me if two weeks at the end of the project was enough time/budget for service transition. Erm, what??

A well rounded PM will be able to communicate to all areas at the right, but not in depth level and manage the project. To be fair there aren't many really really good PM's around. Met plenty of capable ones, some with flaws in their game plan like getting too involved in tech but they manage etc but it's very obvious when you've got one of the proper PM's on board. It's a bit like Business Analysts. Most people can fulfil a BA role but when a proper BA turns up it's very noticeable if you get me.

To be fair I've also met a ton of techies that can't think out of their little box and understand the inner workings of a complex project, stakeholders, budgets etc and just focus on their code/tech thinking it's the only thing on the project worth caring about so it goes both ways.

But yeah, overeager incompetent PM's are a proper mare.

To be fair, if you're going to do any kind of a good job in Service Management, especially in Architecture and Design roles, you'll have a pretty wide-ranging set of skills and knowledge. In my case I've got 15 years programming and 25 years in Service Management starting from basic operator on up, and switching to management when I realised I was on my sixth OS and 15th programming language (including variants). Most PMs aren't anywhere near that kind of background; a bit like politicians, they come up through a fairly narrow path and quite a few have very little real technical expertise at all.

Basically we need to be able to talk to people about their role in their language, be they IT, accounting, plaster board manufacturing, management or civil servant. They don't have to or expect to talk to us in ours.

[NotAllThere]

I must've been unlucky then, never met one of those.
quite the opposite, unfortunately.

If everywhere you go, you smell dog tulip - check your shoes.

In my long and varied career, I've had tech managers who
a) Know they're not the expert
b) Don't know they're not the expert
c) Are an expert

I find c) the worst, because they can check up on what I do. The other two and much easier to bamboozle.

[SueEllen]

you can foxtrot oscar too

Calm down! Calm down!

[northernladuk]

That sounds like the problem isn't that they don't understand the technical side, but they're not a good manager.
A good manager knows they don't understand the technical side and doesn't stick their nose in. Their job is to manage people and understand what those people tell them can or can't be done, and trust them.

I'd agree with this. PM'ing is so much more than techie. Planning, budgets, risk management, stakeholder management and so on that techies can't do and rarely understand. It does need someone that is tech savvy and pick up and get a basic understanding of the tech pretty quickly so they can use the right terminology without knowing detail tech knowledge. It's not just tech, we see the same issues in Service Management where PM's don't fully understand service intro and service ops but as long as they engage me at a reasonable level I don't expect them to know what I do in detail. Two gigs a go a PM approached me with a plan and asked me if two weeks at the end of the project was enough time/budget for service transition. Erm, what??

A well rounded PM will be able to communicate to all areas at the right, but not in depth level and manage the project. To be fair there aren't many really really good PM's around. Met plenty of capable ones, some with flaws in their game plan like getting too involved in tech but they manage etc but it's very obvious when you've got one of the proper PM's on board. It's a bit like Business Analysts. Most people can fulfil a BA role but when a proper BA turns up it's very noticeable if you get me.

To be fair I've also met a ton of techies that can't think out of their little box and understand the inner workings of a complex project, stakeholders, budgets etc and just focus on their code/tech thinking it's the only thing on the project worth caring about so it goes both ways.

But yeah, overeager incompetent PM's are a proper mare.

[sadkingbilly]

you can foxtrot oscar too

[northernladuk]

So the common denominator in "every manager you ever had was terrible" is...

OP walked right in to that one

[sadkingbilly]

So the common denominator in "every manager you ever had was terrible" is...

that old one again, - get yourself a new scriptwriter you bible bashing twat!

[malvolio]

So the common denominator in "every manager you ever had was terrible" is...

Not really. There's a huge number of people that think knowing about desktop Windows PCs or using the Mac universe qualifies them to talk about datacentre technologies, cloud computing and the whole professional IT environment. I've had to explain in detail to one such expert why he had to buy twice as many disk drives if he wanted a proper RAID solution for his office server, and why RAID5 is not a DR solution, it is at best part of a BCP one. Then again, I know of plenty of would be coders who can write apps for Android and think that qualifies them for commercial programming roles.

[d000hg]

I must've been unlucky then, never met one of those.
quite the opposite, unfortunately.

So the common denominator in "every manager you ever had was terrible" is...