The path of the IT-manager (part # 1)
Hello! My name is Alexey and I propose to immediately switch to “you”.
A friend of mine allowed me to publish his story about the path to the leaders, which I do with some literary changes. All matches and names are completely random. The text is written in the first person. Exactly the way he told me about it.
Enjoy reading!
')
When I first began to engage in project management, it seemed to me that it was necessary to go into all the details of the work of my employees.
Having taken the position of leader, I found myself in a situation where my project team does not directly obey me. Yes, they were all allocated a special order for the company in my project for a certain percentage of their time. Someone at 10%, and someone at 50%. At the same time, each of them had his own line manager, whom the guys obeyed much better than me. This picture of subordination is present in an organization with a weak matrix or in functional companies.
In order to competently control the work of my employees, I needed to understand in detail what was going on in their area of work. And I could not become a specialist in all directions at once. I had to believe my people on the word! Can you imagine? Believe Dmitry, Vasily and Igor, that the task “Ticket-12345” will be done in exactly as many days as they said. And, of course, they were regularly mistaken. And I was responsible for the failure of the deadline before my leader.
Do you think that it was necessary to simply lay a bigger buffer? Alas, it does not work, how many do not add. People know that they have a reserve and get down to tasks only when there is very little time left for the deadline. And once again they do not have time to the promised time. Moreover, the overall duration of the project grows. And the final duration is already visible to the client / customer / director.
In general, the difficulty was that I did not know all the specifics of the work of each person in my team. And since I did not know this, I could not reliably verify that their timing was correct. And the team perfectly saw and understood it. I had to overtime, delve into every detail, every project moment, which began to cover me faster and faster like an avalanche. The more time I spent, delving into the specifics, the deeper I burrowed into the technical details of the project that were becoming increasingly unclear to me. The depth of this rabbit hole was infinite. An infinite amount of time is required for infinite detailing. And I only had 8 working hours a day, plus another 6 overtime hours. More, I just could not stand (maybe it saved me).
I began to realize that it was not logical to do more and more work in the wrong direction. The tasks and their technical depth will require from me the knowledge of several technical institutes along with several years of real experience in each of the team’s activities. So many person-years I physically do not have within the project period. And deadline is inexorably approaching.
I realized that the direction of my movement is not correct and to strengthen the work in the wrong direction is a very big folly, which I could have done as a leader. Plus there is a worthless waste of my most valuable resource - time. Instead of managing, I was studying the technical issues of the project. But my specialists in the team are clearly many times more competent than me in technology. It is only necessary to somehow benefit for the project from their competence, without replacing them all with oneself. After all, such a replacement is not physically possible. It is impossible to learn all the knowledge and skills at their level in a short project lifetime, even if the project lasts several years.
And I began to look at management processes. It was in them that I saw my salvation from the spiral of death and professional burnout. And how can you not burn out if I considered myself a class teacher, but in fact the facts spoke about the opposite. The deadlines shifted, tasks were not assessed correctly, the team did not obey me.
>> To be continued
A friend of mine allowed me to publish his story about the path to the leaders, which I do with some literary changes. All matches and names are completely random. The text is written in the first person. Exactly the way he told me about it.
Enjoy reading!
')
When I first began to engage in project management, it seemed to me that it was necessary to go into all the details of the work of my employees.
Having taken the position of leader, I found myself in a situation where my project team does not directly obey me. Yes, they were all allocated a special order for the company in my project for a certain percentage of their time. Someone at 10%, and someone at 50%. At the same time, each of them had his own line manager, whom the guys obeyed much better than me. This picture of subordination is present in an organization with a weak matrix or in functional companies.
In order to competently control the work of my employees, I needed to understand in detail what was going on in their area of work. And I could not become a specialist in all directions at once. I had to believe my people on the word! Can you imagine? Believe Dmitry, Vasily and Igor, that the task “Ticket-12345” will be done in exactly as many days as they said. And, of course, they were regularly mistaken. And I was responsible for the failure of the deadline before my leader.
Do you think that it was necessary to simply lay a bigger buffer? Alas, it does not work, how many do not add. People know that they have a reserve and get down to tasks only when there is very little time left for the deadline. And once again they do not have time to the promised time. Moreover, the overall duration of the project grows. And the final duration is already visible to the client / customer / director.
In general, the difficulty was that I did not know all the specifics of the work of each person in my team. And since I did not know this, I could not reliably verify that their timing was correct. And the team perfectly saw and understood it. I had to overtime, delve into every detail, every project moment, which began to cover me faster and faster like an avalanche. The more time I spent, delving into the specifics, the deeper I burrowed into the technical details of the project that were becoming increasingly unclear to me. The depth of this rabbit hole was infinite. An infinite amount of time is required for infinite detailing. And I only had 8 working hours a day, plus another 6 overtime hours. More, I just could not stand (maybe it saved me).
I began to realize that it was not logical to do more and more work in the wrong direction. The tasks and their technical depth will require from me the knowledge of several technical institutes along with several years of real experience in each of the team’s activities. So many person-years I physically do not have within the project period. And deadline is inexorably approaching.
I realized that the direction of my movement is not correct and to strengthen the work in the wrong direction is a very big folly, which I could have done as a leader. Plus there is a worthless waste of my most valuable resource - time. Instead of managing, I was studying the technical issues of the project. But my specialists in the team are clearly many times more competent than me in technology. It is only necessary to somehow benefit for the project from their competence, without replacing them all with oneself. After all, such a replacement is not physically possible. It is impossible to learn all the knowledge and skills at their level in a short project lifetime, even if the project lasts several years.
And I began to look at management processes. It was in them that I saw my salvation from the spiral of death and professional burnout. And how can you not burn out if I considered myself a class teacher, but in fact the facts spoke about the opposite. The deadlines shifted, tasks were not assessed correctly, the team did not obey me.
>> To be continued
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/352922/
All Articles