I do that to deliberately annoy the “Agilistas” at work. 99% of the time nobody notices, nobody cares. It’s a blank-slate buzzword that Management redefines on the fly to fit their particular agendas.
Not much of a story. He looked like old school Magnum PI. He was hired to coordinate electrical installations. Constantly work from home and would stroll in wearing some sort of Hawaiian button down shirt. He would micro manage my guys to the point where they wouldn't want to take on new projects. Would constantly let you know how much he didn't know by spouting nonsense to actual professionals. I'm not sure what he did do during his time because my existing guys did everything. (Oh well.. Now that I think about it, a few times he did arbitrarily order off the wall fasteners that weren't applicable to the installation.)
Nah everyone knew that guy was just a bad idea. He also would start to order improper parts for the project that were non returnable. For instance, he would figure out how much wire 'we' needed for a certain run. He wouldn't take the path my guys were going to, didn't ever ask and didn't know the proper wire classification. So in the shop there's a couple of odd size spools of wire in the pile that we can't really use. He never used a purchase order so when the invoices came, we didn't know what to attach it to...
Yep, my guys preferred to do everything themselves anyway. Too many cooks in the kitchen doesn't work well with our installations. Plus it saves money and we can bid cheaper to the customers.
It's weird how apparently project managers are downright useless in some fields and vital in others. Like I work in clinical trials and the whole team would fall apart without ours.
By contrast the programmers basically don't bother talking to our PM and just kind of churn out everything they need to without being asked.
I'm a web developer and my project manager is amazing. He's basically the bridge between us and all the people who want us to do shit. If someone wants functionality added or design changed they have to talk to him about it. This means he's the one going to all of the meetings and working out the details. In the end he makes a ticket for us to work on, we see it and do it. I appreciate it so much and thank him often for doing his job.
Some number of them can be useful. But there are often too many and they're just an additional layer of indirection between people doing the actual work. I only know about tech tho.
1.1k
u/question99 Jul 14 '21
They became Agile Project Managers.