"Tell me what date task X will occur on." -- where task 'X' takes 5 minutes, but has a long list of pre-requisites that take 1-4 weeks each, sequentially, of which 100% our out of our control.
...
That's not planning, that's fortune-telling. You may as well ask an Ouija board.
Planning is making sure the the pre-requisites happen before you attempt to start the things that depend on them. It is making sure that everyone is unblocked. It is making sure that nobody is wasting time going down a dead end. It is making sure that everyone is rowing in the same direction.
What I see from PMs is that they just want facts from the future, instead of solving problems in the here and now.
Until today, weeks into the project, I could not access the system that I needed. This was the key pre-requisite for 4x FTEs progressing on their own tasks.
The only thing the PM did is repeatedly ask me if he needed to move the date for the completion ETA.
I solved the problem. He did nothing to expedite progress.
Does it really matter which specific date this occurred on? No. It just had to happen as soon as possible. The trick is to make it possible, not to try to pin down exactly when "soon" will occur by repeatedly asking the same question in every daily stand up.
Like the parent poster said, people are on a bell curve. It sounds like you may only have been exposed to mediocre, passable, or plain bad PM's so far in your career.
So I'll remind you: the reason we pay PM's is because good PM's can, and do, exist. I've only worked with a few great PM's, but they outshone their competition with just as much brilliance as the 10x among us engineers outshine the 1x. It's ironic that you would reduce PM's to a single heterogeneous caricature in reply to an article that is essentially saying that it's harmful to do so.
That was the glory of the good ole Gannt Chart in what I might call Microsoft Project Based Project Management.
If you set your dependencies right, the dates would just slip by themselves, and it was easy to tell the bosses what slipped. Required a lot of printing and taping every week, and caused a ton of headache whenever people lied about their progress, and didn’t really work without a FTE project manager, but I have yet to see a supposedly better system actually work better on big projects.
"Tell me what date task X will occur on." -- where task 'X' takes 5 minutes, but has a long list of pre-requisites that take 1-4 weeks each, sequentially, of which 100% our out of our control.
...
That's not planning, that's fortune-telling. You may as well ask an Ouija board.
Planning is making sure the the pre-requisites happen before you attempt to start the things that depend on them. It is making sure that everyone is unblocked. It is making sure that nobody is wasting time going down a dead end. It is making sure that everyone is rowing in the same direction.
What I see from PMs is that they just want facts from the future, instead of solving problems in the here and now.
Until today, weeks into the project, I could not access the system that I needed. This was the key pre-requisite for 4x FTEs progressing on their own tasks.
The only thing the PM did is repeatedly ask me if he needed to move the date for the completion ETA.
I solved the problem. He did nothing to expedite progress.
Does it really matter which specific date this occurred on? No. It just had to happen as soon as possible. The trick is to make it possible, not to try to pin down exactly when "soon" will occur by repeatedly asking the same question in every daily stand up.
Why do we pay these people, again? Remind me?