There are several things nobody told me before I became PM. Most of these things are deeply related to my background knowledge, but probably, even if you do not work on the same field I work, you will find these tips useful.
- Project Managers are responsible for all the work they do not execute. WTF? Back in the school you could say: Hey! I didn’t do it! It wasn’t me! – But now you are forced to assume any responsibility of the work that has been done by others -on your team of course! “Solution doesn’t work”, “There are several bugs”, “It doesn’t fulfill the client expectations” -It doesn’t occur often if you do your homework, but, it happens at least once so you have to be prepared. Fail is natural to human condition. Are you prepared to fail? Are you ready to get over it and assume the responsibility for others code? -from a coder perspective it could mean kill someone!
- Project Managers should say client Yes/No and When. Coders aren’t forced to do that -that’s why PM’s estimate. Does it sounds familiar to you? “I’m doing ok with code, it will take like, uhmmm, uhmmm, uhmmm, -then silence- then a value plus extra time for them”.
- Project Managers will use email clients, office productivity tools including spreadsheets -a lot of spreadsheets- over the lovely IDE -oh man, that sucks. Even the useful textedit… how I miss you?
- Project Managers will have to say at least once “No” and get mad with their bosses while they are Gold-Plating the clients. The awful thing is that once bosses do that, PMs will have to assume again the responsibility to deliver the new extremely-simple-to-do addition while also have to listen the complains of the team.
- Project Managers will solve problems between team members. I do no like democracy (democracy is for small cities and countries where their ability to decide and vote is supported by a deep and clear perspective of the community and its future). PM is only one guy, he/she listen, process and decide -NICE!!! no voting, no democracy.
- Hands-on Project Managers will also deliver the projects. It means most of the time, deploy to servers, and do a “lite-end-user qa”. Not your case? YOU ARE SO LUCKY!
- Project Managers will receive more money -it is not always the case, but here in Colombia, IT IS the case.
If you have any additional thing your mom didn’t told you about PM, feel free to post it as a comment.