Who knows a good IT-Manager, or A Good Manager Is Able To Manage Everything
In real world projects, we do not only have a sort of voodoo consultants, but also a special kind of IT-Managers and project's leaders. They believe the following statement "Good Manager Is Able To Manage Everything", is very like "A Good Developer Is Able To Develop In Every Programming Language" :-). The problem with this approach is: such managers are only able to ask questions and wait for the answers - without understanding the context. Because they do not (and often also do not want) understand, how software engineering works, they try to compare it with another disciplines. Common fallacies like: offshore is cheaper, or we can deliver faster with more developers, or good analysts and architects are more important than developers came from this understanding.
In my opinion, it is nearly impossible, to manage software projects, without understanding it. I met several managers, but only few (actually two), were really good. The big distinction is: "good" managers try to understand, communicate and react to the challenges in the software development, without COS strategies. They are accepted by developers and customers.
So IT-manager should be only another role in the software development lifecycle, with added value to the result. In this case he should not only work with MS project, PowerPoint and Visio, but also trying to understand the developers and especially TRUST them.
I recently talked to a manager while we sat in a winery. He said something like this:
Basically you try to hide the sh*t under the cover until the whole thing explodes. By then you must have made sure that all documents and protocols are complete are complete and properly signed off. It does not matter if they contain no useful content at all.
PS: I had to rephrase the paragraph above around 30 times before it wasn't considered as SPAM.
Posted by JustACoder on October 13, 2006 at 01:56 PM CEST #