Who are PM and how they are painted.
Another article about anything, or welcome to project management.
Under such a usual abbreviation “PM” hides just a breakthrough to the people. If you ask the first available developer how PM is decrypted, then the Project Manager will be answered with almost 100% probability. If the world of application development ended in small teams in small firms with small customers, then it would have been. And it’s not even the fact that DevLead (I like to call them Devly) would go further. But IT, like any industry, is growing and developing in breadth and high. And here begin to be fruitful of varying complexity and neglect of PM.
The first, so familiar to rumors of developers and small businesses, PM is the Project Manager. Appearing at the dawn of labor history Project Manager (we will write here in English manners, with a capital letter) does not disappear throughout the entire production process. Unless in the various largest companies he assumes various duties. If in small firms the project manager in a project is a king and a god, then with the growth of a staff of people subordinate to him, his responsibilities more and more shift from project management to ... managing the people who do this project. Yes, he still distributes tasks between developers / departments, he still monitors bugs and tells what will be done and when. But he no longer needs to communicate with sellers, follow competitors (if any) and write tons of documentation (he still writes a bunch of documents, but not as much as he could). Here PM # 2 comes to the rescue. No, this is not Paper Man, although its activities can be described as "the planned destruction of green spaces in the Amazon delta." This is the younger inseparable brother of Project Manager'a - Product Manager. A product manager, unlike a project manager, doesn’t care about man-hours and talents of each individual developer. He is only interested in such things as the date of release of the product and what kind of functionality from all that he invented will be dragged by the project manager to this very project. The product manager intensively communicates with sellers, participates in exhibitions, tells how wonderful this particular product is and spies on competitors. On the basis of observations, personal experience and intuition, the product manager writes dizzying specifications for the future product, and the project manager then tries to implement all this. In different companies, product managers sometimes mean the most unexpected things. So you may be asked to be a person who watches products in the most direct sense of the word. For example, to control the shipment of licensed copies from the warehouse.
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But in fact, all this is not true. If you are a big firm with properly set processes and adequate employees, here appears PM # 3, which is the head of everything, - Program Manager, invented by Microsoft for its internal needs in its eighty hairy year. A program manager is such a helpful person to whom you can fold all the bumps and claims if the project fails. And such a person who is personally responsible for the happiness and well-being of the project as a whole, and of each of its participants in particular. It combines the responsibilities of both a project manager and a product manager.
There are transitional stages between these main types of PMs. There are also titles, almost like in the army. There are senior PM, lead PM, junior PM, just PM.
Why all this article? In the realities of the post-Soviet IT market, when you come to an interview at the PM position, you can almost never guess what you are offered. And what was written in the requirements for the position on the website of the employer often does not meet the reality. So you can either become devly, or get bogged down in a pile of documents, and long lists of responsibilities without getting the right to vote.
In subsequent articles, the “secret” secrets of the documents will be revealed, the compilation of which is mandatory for PM’s and the short course of the project’s life from the point of view of the Amazon forest, and not the developers (or other human resources).
In conclusion, I would like to say that in addition to the “manage”, which lies at the heart of the PM position, there is also an “answer”. These are the two most important and first duties that he must perform. And if you think that PM is nonsense, do not laugh at it. Driving is really important. Another question is that the ship should have only one captain. But that's another story.
Under such a usual abbreviation “PM” hides just a breakthrough to the people. If you ask the first available developer how PM is decrypted, then the Project Manager will be answered with almost 100% probability. If the world of application development ended in small teams in small firms with small customers, then it would have been. And it’s not even the fact that DevLead (I like to call them Devly) would go further. But IT, like any industry, is growing and developing in breadth and high. And here begin to be fruitful of varying complexity and neglect of PM.
The first, so familiar to rumors of developers and small businesses, PM is the Project Manager. Appearing at the dawn of labor history Project Manager (we will write here in English manners, with a capital letter) does not disappear throughout the entire production process. Unless in the various largest companies he assumes various duties. If in small firms the project manager in a project is a king and a god, then with the growth of a staff of people subordinate to him, his responsibilities more and more shift from project management to ... managing the people who do this project. Yes, he still distributes tasks between developers / departments, he still monitors bugs and tells what will be done and when. But he no longer needs to communicate with sellers, follow competitors (if any) and write tons of documentation (he still writes a bunch of documents, but not as much as he could). Here PM # 2 comes to the rescue. No, this is not Paper Man, although its activities can be described as "the planned destruction of green spaces in the Amazon delta." This is the younger inseparable brother of Project Manager'a - Product Manager. A product manager, unlike a project manager, doesn’t care about man-hours and talents of each individual developer. He is only interested in such things as the date of release of the product and what kind of functionality from all that he invented will be dragged by the project manager to this very project. The product manager intensively communicates with sellers, participates in exhibitions, tells how wonderful this particular product is and spies on competitors. On the basis of observations, personal experience and intuition, the product manager writes dizzying specifications for the future product, and the project manager then tries to implement all this. In different companies, product managers sometimes mean the most unexpected things. So you may be asked to be a person who watches products in the most direct sense of the word. For example, to control the shipment of licensed copies from the warehouse.
')
But in fact, all this is not true. If you are a big firm with properly set processes and adequate employees, here appears PM # 3, which is the head of everything, - Program Manager, invented by Microsoft for its internal needs in its eighty hairy year. A program manager is such a helpful person to whom you can fold all the bumps and claims if the project fails. And such a person who is personally responsible for the happiness and well-being of the project as a whole, and of each of its participants in particular. It combines the responsibilities of both a project manager and a product manager.
There are transitional stages between these main types of PMs. There are also titles, almost like in the army. There are senior PM, lead PM, junior PM, just PM.
Why all this article? In the realities of the post-Soviet IT market, when you come to an interview at the PM position, you can almost never guess what you are offered. And what was written in the requirements for the position on the website of the employer often does not meet the reality. So you can either become devly, or get bogged down in a pile of documents, and long lists of responsibilities without getting the right to vote.
In subsequent articles, the “secret” secrets of the documents will be revealed, the compilation of which is mandatory for PM’s and the short course of the project’s life from the point of view of the Amazon forest, and not the developers (or other human resources).
In conclusion, I would like to say that in addition to the “manage”, which lies at the heart of the PM position, there is also an “answer”. These are the two most important and first duties that he must perform. And if you think that PM is nonsense, do not laugh at it. Driving is really important. Another question is that the ship should have only one captain. But that's another story.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/14231/
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