Managing and Technical Life — Reprise

Give the amount of mis­in­ter­pret­a­tion from my pre­vi­ous post, let me expand my hypo­thesis a little fur­ther.

I am quite com­fort­able with man­age­ment, and I wel­come it. And I love the fact the “Project Managers” do the sec­ret­arial work for my pro­jects. However, the cur­rent busi­ness trend appears to go some­thing like this :

Manager: I had a prob­lem and by some effect­ive man­age­ment it was solved.

Engineer: By remov­ing all my other tasks, or loc­at­ing the cor­rect resources, yes I was able to solve your problem.

Manager: I con­clude that more man­age­ment solves engin­eer­ing prob­lems. I will rush out now and get more man­age­ment to solve more problems.

I do not have a prob­lem with this approach. I have a hypo­thesis that the race to remove middle man­age­ment over the last twenty years has prob­ably reached its ulti­mate con­clu­sion. We have replaced them with Project Managers who effect­ively per­form the func­tions of middle man­age­ment¹. Many com­pan­ies need more man­age­ment time to con­trol and dir­ect busi­ness practice.

I sus­pect that many of the com­plaints that engin­eers dir­ect at man­age­ment are due to a short­age of man­age­ment resource and skill. As proof, speak to engin­eers who have worked with good managers.

However, the “More Management is bet­ter” idea is flawed if taken too far². Engineers tend to under­es­tim­ate the time needed to com­plete a work pack­age³. At the crit­ical point when this is real­ised, get­ting more engin­eers isn’t prac­tical. Why ? Because they can be hard to get, takes time to insuf­flate the pro­ject know­ledge and become a part of the team. Importantly, rel­at­ive to pro­ject man­age­ment, increas­ing engin­eer­ing resource takes much longer so the tend­ency is to add PM’s and not engin­eers in crit­ical phases of a project.

Conlusion

Some more engin­eer­ing resource is the only solu­tion. Applying more man­age­ment doesn’t get the work done even though it might seem like it.

That’s the dif­fer­ence between soft and hard skills.

Footnotes

1. dis­claimer: as stated pre­vi­ously, this is not derog­at­ory to Project Management, far from it — it goes a long way in improv­ing my life [back]
2. and the reverse is also true [back]
3. and there is a whole ‘nuther art­icle [back]

Please rate this post:

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...