[sjg007]

What are the traits of the good managers you experienced? And what are the traits of the bad ones? And what about the respective projects themselves: did they have good management vs bad management aspects?

Good project management is about communication. For all the respective participants, stakeholders, everyone has to be on the same definition of success. If not, you have to manage those expectations. In a bad project, different stake holders have completely different and sometimes unrealistic expectations.

I found that good managers rely heavily on experience or some form of "knowledge" to anticipate future problems and head them off. This could be technical, personality, business requirements, business externalities etc... A good manager also buffers, insulates and frees up the time of their engineers so they can do the technical work itself with little distraction. Above and beyond protect your people.

Personally I've found that people who are project managers who don't have any technical experience in the domain tend to be worse than those that do have technical experience since they don't fundamentally understand the work. However, there are exceptions.

Oh and add at least 100-150% to any and all software timeline estimates. Also don't throw more people at a problem.