Project Managers and Paper Bags

I work within the IT industry for a software house, doing a highly technical job that takes me all over the place and gives me the opportunity to meet a broad mix of different customers, and work on a good selection of reasonably large-scale software implementation projects.

Over the past couple of years, or perhaps a little longer - myself and many of my colleagues have started to notice a fairly worrying pattern beginning to emerge within the IT sector; more specifically within the approach and organisation of medium-large software implementation projects.

It's simply this: the number of project managers within IT appears to be growing at an exponential rate, and the number of skilled staff that are actually capable of delivering anything tangible on a given project is in a reciprocal decline.

Whereas perhaps five years ago, when working through a deployment lifecycle on a medium duration/medium complexity project there might have been maybe one, possibly two project managers involved, my recent experience has been that for an equivalent project (even on the much smaller, tactical projects) I regularly have to liase with and bump up against anywhere up to about ten PM's in order to make any kind of forward progress at all.

To avoid any misunderstanding, let me clarify what (in this context) I mean by a project manager:

• Anyone that can't be seen to directly contribute to the project through the production of anything directly related to the delivery of the end product. (And that could be anything tangible such as documents, code, training etc...)
• Anyone that insists on only having a "high level" view of the various project elements.
• Anyone that appears to spend a great deal of their time dealing with "issues" and allegedly "managing risks".
• Anyone that has no apparent grasp of technical aspects of the project, and isn't a key business stakeholder affiliated with the project.
• Anyone from a non-technical background who attends a large number of meetings within the working week.
  

So it's not just the traditional notion of a PM, I'm probably abusing the term a bit here so that it encompasses all non-productive members of the project team.

Ideally, a strong PM should have the correct background for an IT project - not like Ralph here, who didn't realise until it was too late that in actual fact, a SAP workflow solution was required and not an extension to the local public toilets.

I guess what I'm really saying is that there's generally a lot more useless cruft wrapped around even the most simple projects these days, and what's more it appears to be consistently impacting the delivery capability inherent within the technical teams on these projects.

That's not all:

• IT project implementation costs are steadily on the increase, as the amount of money required to support superfluous project staff also increases.
• IT project implementation timescales are stretching, as more and more time is taken over pointless meetings and debates within entire clusters of non-technical project affiliates, for the sake of some weird form of self-fulfillment or self-aggrandisement. Often, key technical people are diverted away from productive work in order to attend such meetings, or to participate in such debates just in order to introduce some level of credibility to the whole charade.
• The number of key risks - which should be managed by this crew of project managers - is actually increasing in most projects due to poor communication and "chinese whispers" developing between and amongst them. (I could cite several examples where pretty innocuous events have been turned into deal-breakers as a result of this).
• Software-based solutions are consistently failing to meet requirements as a result of the previous three points, largely because of the fact that over-spend and poor project time-management ultimately result in feature reduction and requirements sidelining. It's a regular thing.

So, is this just bureaucracy gone mad or is there something fundamentally broken (or breaking) within the IT sector? Am I just working on entirely the wrong projects?

I personally think that there are a number of things going on:

• There is (and it's well documented) a genuine skills shortage within the IT sector, and the number of experienced, well-qualified technical staff to work on individual projects has dropped significantly over the past five or so years.
• There is an increase in the number of workers within the IT sector, but many of them lack the basic understanding of the fundamental principles behind computing and at a higher level, IT.
  
• Those people with little or no technical grasp of the subject matter are beginning to display aspirations to move into project management as a distinct, worthwhile career path. Without any formal technical grounding in the projects that they'd hope to manage. (It's like the old adage - "If you can't do, teach".)
  
• There is an decreasing lack of understanding at a business level as to what's involved in delivering any form of engineering project, of which IT projects are just a subset. For some reason, with the rise of the throway consumerist society it appears to be the normal expectation now that IT systems can be deployed simply with little real technical skill and knowledge.
• To supplement the lack of skilled resource (which has the net effect of driving up project cost and therefore commercial risk) companies have locked into this vicious cycle of employing more and more people in lower-middle management roles, to somehow manage this risk, without understanding that increased beurocracy leads to increased cost.
• Outsourcing of IT has exacerbated this whole thing, given that nowadays in large companies that have outsourced vast tracts of their IT delivery capability a larger part of project implementation time is spent fencing around the SLA (service level agreement) as opposed to actually getting anything done.
• Outsourcing has also (quite successfully unfortunately) managed to reinforce this belief that lots of lower-cost resource is better than smaller numbers of higher-cost expert resource. This is a complete piece of kiddology. Use of lower cost, high volume resource increases the management overhead on a project, decreases overall quality on a project and fundamentally stifles the innovation that needs to be present as part of the makeup of any successful solution delivery.
• The internal organisation and IT delivery capability within more and more private organisations is beginning to - through regulatory policy making and massively complex third-party supplier relationships - beginning to parallel the business model of the most inefficient organisational structures we know of: the public sector organisations such as those run by the government. (I'd love to hear from anyone that can credibly put up a strong counter-argument that these organisations operate at peak efficiency).
  

A pragmatic approach to project management can bring about a healthy orange glow that invigorates and revitalises the entire project team.

I don't have anything specific against project managers - so please all you PM's out there please don't take this personally. What I'm actually quite concerned about is what appears to be a general malaise within the IT sector at the moment, which (if it spins out to its natural conclusion) the economic downturn we're currently seeing could well make a whole lot worse.

There is, of course a definite need for good, strong project managers on all but the most trivial of projects, and I'm actually honoured to work with a couple of people that succeed in turning project management into a real asset on a number of gigs. What I really find frustrating is this apparent wish to over-egg the whole management side of IT projects at present.

Is this just me, or does anyone else have a similar (or counter) viewpoint on the whole thing?