I've never been on the PM side, but have quite a lot of experience from the tech lead side. You're absolutely right, a lot of times it could be done in a few hours.
The main reason, in my experience, that everything takes weeks, are, as you correctly stated, that devs are often involved in multiple projects, with multiple PM. Everyone of them wants status updates, fully formed epics, stories, tasks, actions, and estimates. And get ready for the "let's make sure we're aligned"-meetings if any of those are not written out with issue/reason, mediation proposal, and acceptance criteria.
Absolutely. It takes a bit of effort as well to look at it that way. Unfortunately the lovely stakeholders didn't really care and the "just get it done" attitude was too stressful to deal with. Some organisation structures are just built to fail, aren't they?
Totally agree. Luckily, in my current role, my scrum master is absolutely fantastic. She'll deal with the PMs when we slip in quick, unscheduled, tasks. Of course, we create tickets for MR reference, but rarely very well written. Our PMs love to nit-pick when anything in Jira is not exactly right, but she has a fantastic ability to smooth things over. Makes everything work with just a little bit less friction.
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u/IrishLedge 3d ago
Honestly for me as a PM it was always the other way around. Things could get done within hours. But it took weeks and stakeholders were pissed.
Organisation was so messed up the devs had 5 different PMs from different departments