Do you still have project managers?

An open letter to everyone who employs project managers

Hi,

so you have one or more project managers on your team or in your company. What benefits exactly do you expect from a project manager? I assume you want your team to achieve one or more of the following goals:

• Deliver what you want
• Deliver what you need
• Deliver it on time
• Stay within budget
• Make it cheaper
• Make money
• Stay happy
• Still have energy for the next project

You don’t trust your team to achieve these goals on their own, so you hire a project manager. You expect the compound positive impact of a project manager towards these goals to be greater than his costs.

A quick question: did you ever try to do a project without a project manager? You must have, right; how else would be so sure about needing one? Ok, let’s see, what a typical project manager will do for you…

What a project manager will do for you

The project manager knows your goals and constraints. You give him time and cost constraints and tell him what to achieve. In rare cases he might not only know what you want to achieve, but also what you need to achieve. The project manager will translate your wishes into his goal framework:

• Create a detailed plan or multiple plans
• Define a whole set of sub-goals
• Define as many features as possible
• Staff the team — the more people, the better
• Find and introduce software tools — the more, the better
• …

So he turns your wishes into more — more details, more people, more moving parts, more more. Great, you think: more means more money for me, too! What these new goals of your project manager actually achieve, is:

• More features…
  ⇒ make decisions harder
  ⇒ erase any trace of personality from your product
  ⇒ make feedback harder to attribute
• Many goals…
  ⇒ have you juggling many balls
  ⇒ stress out your team
  ⇒ divert focus
• More people…
  ⇒ cost more time
  ⇒ decrease the team’s energy
  ⇒ make results worse
• Many tools…
  ⇒ divert focus
  ⇒ increase cost to find information
  ⇒ create communication gaps
• Detailed plans…
  ⇒ decrease flexibility
  ⇒ increase details
  ⇒ increase adaptation costs

This doesn’t sound too good, does it? In reality, you will not notice these implications of the project manager’s goal framework directly. You will rather see several symptoms of it popping up in your project:

The symptoms of something going wrong

• Customers don’t buy (anymore)
• Customer feedback does not lead to product improvements
• Team motivation dwindles
• Jokes about meetings, their frequency and their lack of results
• Team loses itself in details and does not know the vision
• Tools are abused or circumvented
• Team does not know about decisions
• Plans are outdated, not known to the team or simply don’t reflect reality

By translating your goals into his language, the project manager now actually works against your goals! Sadly, the instinctive reaction to these symptoms is:

• Customers don’t buy (anymore)?
  ⇒ More features!
• Customer feedback does not lead to product improvements?
  ⇒ Get more people on the team!
• Team motivation dwindles?
  ⇒ Morale-boosting slogans!
• Jokes about meetings, their frequency and their lack of results?
  ⇒ Cookies on the meeting table!
• Team loses itself in details and does not know the vision?
  ⇒ Appeal to the “startup spirit” and the “entrepreneurial employee”!
• Tools are abused or circumvented?
  ⇒ Trainings on tools!
• Team does not know about decisions?
  ⇒ Introduce a new tool to communicate decisions!
• Plans are outdated, not known to the team or simply don’t reflect reality?
  ⇒ Spend more time on plans! More details!

vicious circle (noun): […] a chain of events in which the response to one difficulty creates a new problem that aggravates the original difficulty — called also vicious cycle.
– Webster dictionary

I ask you now: do you still think you need to employ project managers to make your projects successful?

Disclaimer: Not all project managers will ruin your project! From my own studies of project management during my master at university I know that the discipline of project managemet holds many useful methods and tools. There are many great and talented people out there with the tag “project manager”! However, I think that these people are fantastic, because they do so many other things but project management and even refrain from “managing projects” altogether. I have very high respect for these people, but I have absolutely no respect for the role of project manager or for people acting like they have no brain.

What you can do instead

So what is my proposed solution? Not employing project managers? Yes! Leave the team alone? No! A team greatly benefits from a coach and facilitator, from a clear vision or from some real leaders among the team members. In none of my projects have I ever really seen a need for a formal position above the team (like a project manager). If you need someone to report progress (bad sign!), talk to stakeholders or have his head chopped off in case of failure, there are plenty of other options to choose from.

However you go about defining, staffing and planning your next project, I want to give you these overall suggestions:

• Do less! (read about it: Paradox of Choice, The Lean Startup, Business Model Generation, Agile Manifesto)
• Don’t distance yourself from the product and the customer out of fear or uncertainty! (read about it: Customer Development)
• Be pragmatic and just do it!
• Skip the detailed plan, but don’t skip the vision!

I had the honor to be part of many projects, where these suggestions were embraced and led to amazing results. I played the role of facilitator, coach, scrum master, product owner, enabler or sparring partner. And if I can save only one of your projects from the vicious circle of project management by writing this article, I’ll be a happy man!

Feel free to contact me or my team at Dreimannzelt for support on your project. And if you enjoyed this article, please give it a little ♥︎ below.

Cheers,

Matthias