[nialse]

I’m not sure what your question is. It seems you want to know what management (or project management) is and what it’s good for? That is indeed a good question sometimes and can be quite challenging to figure out coming from a developer background. In general I would say that management exists to make sure the things the customers need (the value) is delivered on time and on budget with the resources available and with the necessary quality. How well management does that varies of course.

[jamespaden]

There's obviously a lot of different project management strategies.

Some companies seem to have project managers assign daily tasks to each developer. The PMs then spend a lot of time defining the tasks and moving the schedule around. They have weekly/daily meetings with other PMs to do cross-project planning.

On the other hand, Basecamp's Shape Up (https://basecamp.com/shapeup) process defines a desired outcome with some clear parameters and a six-week deadline and simply lets the team figure out the rest. There's not a lot of project management happening on a week-by-week basis.

So my question is, what do teams in the middle of those two extremes do? How do teams spend less time on minutia of planning projects and tasks and more time doing?

[sharemywin]

My 2 cents:

A lot depends on the size and nature of the work. if your project is big enough it needs multiple PMs then there's a lot of time needed for coordination and cross communication.

I do find that asking if a task is 50% done is kind of random and that task should be broken down into something that's more concrete and binary(is it done or not). so it's ok to report 8 of 10 tasks are complete but asking an individual 80% of X is complete is probably not helpful.

daily standups help because it uncovers blockers and helps people admit when their stuck. and can help with redistributing the work.

as for documentation, I feel if you can't commit to documenting what it is you want then it's probably not a priority.

document discovery is a big problem in a large project/org.

you wouldn't write a book without an editor so it's probably good to have a qa person be another set of eyes on what needs to be done.

having a BA/product owner on the business side helps the business own the product and takes alot of the prioritization off of the development side. Having a BA that's done the job using the software helps.

[nialse]

That is indeed an interesting question. Thanks for clarifying!

[jamespaden]

No problem! It's a weird question to ask. A lot of companies just hire a project manager and let them work it out. There seems like there should be a better way, or at least some partial alternatives. I'm hoping to find some answers.

[nialse]

Funny you should mention that. I've just been hired as a project manager to do just that. Figure it out. I see myself as infrastructure, my work is to build a structure to enable others to do what they do best. Then again, it's my job to develop the plan on how to do that within the given constraints.

[jamespaden]

Ha! I think project managers as infrastructure makes a lot of sense. Just seems like there should be ways to smooth out the process, especially with smaller teams/companies so less project management is required.