| I like having a certain amount of process as well, but I interpreted the article as being more about the dynamic between the developers and the PMs than process in general. In my experience, different orgs use PMs in different ways. The most positive experiences I've had has been with PMs who were there to facilitate communication, get people unblocked, keep track of requirements and big picture stuff, and in general to help people out and worry about certain things so the engineers don't have to. I've also had bad experiences with PMs in other orgs. In the bad cases, the PMs are used by upper management solely to keep an eye on everyone, not to help them. These are the places where the only time you deal with PMs is when they summon you into meetings to explain why you're not done with something yet, or they pop into your office to give you a list of items and want to know which ones are done and what's the ETA on everything else. When used appropriately, PMs can be a godsend and no one resents having to deal with them because they make everyone's jobs easier. When used inappropriately, all they ever do is go around and harass people with stuff like, "is X done yet, and if not, what's the ETA?" When used in that capacity, that means they been drafted into a different role where they're being used by higher-level management to stay on top of everyone and roll up daily or weekly reports that the higher-level managers then send up to their managers to make it look like they're in control of the situation. When used extremely inappropriately, you will see a (anti)pattern of gradually increasing granularity in how they track people. They go from tracking high level goals and milestones to tracking people and projects with increasing levels of granularity. They go from tracking engineering time in terms of months or weeks to days or hours. Eventually this granularity crosses some threshold of usefulness, and it starts having detrimental effects on the results. Things like refactoring or code cleanup or really just doing anything that is not working on a specific new feature becomes verboten. People start exaggerating their time estimates to give themselves wiggle room, or to sneak in extra time for critical maintenance work that is not associated with a shipping feature. Eventually everyone's just lying to everyone about everything, and the constant meetings and "are you done yet?" pop-ins become pointless rituals that waste everyone's time but continue happening with greater frequency. |