Project Management 101: The Importance Of Your Team

I decided to write this blog because 2 project managers at a publicly traded company recently asked me a hypothetical question: "what if the engineers tell you that a component that needs to be developed (using PHP) is going to take 3 weeks to complete - but you need it in 1 week?"

Before I address the above question, I think it's worth mentioning that web development teams are most commonly comprised of the following four groups:

1. Stakeholders (owners, executives, marketing, editors, etc.)
2. Tech (web developers, integrators, database engineers, IT specialists, etc.)
3. Designers (graphic and UI designers)
4. Project Manager (can be more than one, in hierarchical form)

The normal course of a project almost always begins with a directive that comes from a project's stakeholders (at large companies, it might be a visionary executive or at the grassroots level, an entrepreneur). If they're not already, it's important for marketing to be involved on a foundational level, so that advertising and pr campaigns can be planned well in advance.

With that said, it's now left up to the project manager to assemble the tech and design teams, create a schedule, identify dependencies, budget, and at times, function as gatekeeper, mediator, negotiator and peace keeper. In short, the project manager is the kingpin from which a project's success hinges.

Getting back to our hypothetical question. My first thought was that the team at the company in question was probably in trouble, most likely due to missed deadlines or unrealistic goals that had been imposed upon the engineering team in the past. The company thought that the solution to the problem would be to hire project managers who were highly skilled in various programming languages. However, this is a mistake due to confusion or lack of understanding between a tech lead and a project manager.

A project manager should have an understanding of a project's related programming languages, especially in terms of their respective limitations and current best uses. However, it is unprecedented for a project manager to be required to perform programming work, while simultaneously managing a project's development and coordinating the efforts of the various groups listed above.

My response to the question was that I would rely on input from my engineering team. It was at that point, I noticed the two gentlemen's eyes glaze over and ears fill with wax. What they also didn't know (and quite possibly might have been a foreign concept) was that my response assumed that trust existed between myself and the engineering team (and for that matter, between all the teams on the project). The answer here was so simple, that it was easy to miss!

Two things come to mind: Dilbert and Occam's Razor, which states that, "All things being equal, the simplest solution is best."