BunsGettingFirm
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2004
- Messages
- 1,502
My new job is managing technology projects now that my finance job is pretty much done after integrating the company that Mega Corp bought 2 years ago.
I don't have any direct reports, but I get to assign work to a pool of engineers and support people. The engineers have been spectacular. The support people and other business function people not such much. We have a support guy whose main job consists of a) watching You Tube/Hulu and b) complaining about not getting enough interesting work. However, when given interesting work such as designing a support package for upcoming projects, the work he's produced has been more thunder than rain -- he makes a big deal of every little thing he does in front of the big boss but then try to drag me into every one of his project to be the human shield. I have pushed back and assigned the project back to him. I'm trying to determine if the constant need to grab on to other people is a sign of laziness or a sign of insecurity. If it's the latter, a little hand holding from me, and he will be able to do the work of interfacing with IT and other business functions. If it's the former, I may have to get on his case more aggressively.
As for the other "business" folks, half are a bunch of walking hot air bags who are able to drag out "I don't know what the hell I'm talking about" into a 5 minute speech followed up with a "Why don't you make that an action item?" I wasted 3 hours yesterday re-doing stats because another project manager made such a fundamental mistake as using a single week's data to project out over the lifetime of the project. Then I had to explain to him that drawing a line with a single point is not good math. It's much more realistic to look a the real stats over the life of the project rather than trying to be lazy and project using a single point. Meanwhile, i could have used the time to make further progress pushing my own project.
I don't have any direct reports, but I get to assign work to a pool of engineers and support people. The engineers have been spectacular. The support people and other business function people not such much. We have a support guy whose main job consists of a) watching You Tube/Hulu and b) complaining about not getting enough interesting work. However, when given interesting work such as designing a support package for upcoming projects, the work he's produced has been more thunder than rain -- he makes a big deal of every little thing he does in front of the big boss but then try to drag me into every one of his project to be the human shield. I have pushed back and assigned the project back to him. I'm trying to determine if the constant need to grab on to other people is a sign of laziness or a sign of insecurity. If it's the latter, a little hand holding from me, and he will be able to do the work of interfacing with IT and other business functions. If it's the former, I may have to get on his case more aggressively.
As for the other "business" folks, half are a bunch of walking hot air bags who are able to drag out "I don't know what the hell I'm talking about" into a 5 minute speech followed up with a "Why don't you make that an action item?" I wasted 3 hours yesterday re-doing stats because another project manager made such a fundamental mistake as using a single week's data to project out over the lifetime of the project. Then I had to explain to him that drawing a line with a single point is not good math. It's much more realistic to look a the real stats over the life of the project rather than trying to be lazy and project using a single point. Meanwhile, i could have used the time to make further progress pushing my own project.