I get lots of thanks and kudos for pmclinic, a discussion list about real issues managers face, despite the fact I don’t contribute much directly to the thing anymore, and Shawn Murphy runs the list. Instead it’s 5 or 10 really smart, wise people who do much of the posting and advice giving.

One of these smart, wise, clever contributors is an industry veteran named Steven Levy. Why do I mention him now? Here’s why.

He’s set up shop on his own at a shiny new blog on project management called: No Secrets.

He’s already been busy with posts on How to kill projects, and is your boss a manager or an administrator?. Check it out.

I’ve received quite a few applications for this role, but there’s still time to apply. I’ll be closing the door this friday. Details on the role here:

Job opening for PM-Clinic

Five years ago I started a simple little discussion list called pmclinic. The idea was simple: e-mail out a real world management situation on Monday, discuss it all week, write a summary on Friday.

Unlike most discussion lists, the idea created a surprisingly high signal to noise ratio. As the months went by, without any PR or much of a web presence, the list grew. Today the list has over 1000 members. We’ve covered hundreds of situations, and the list is still going strong.

There are dozens of things that need to be done, from making the list archives public, to getting the list out of the technology dark ages. And the best way for that to happen is to hand the reigns over to someone new.

This opportunity could be great for either a veteran who’s looking for something fun and different to work on with big networking opportunities, or even a rock star intern, college student, or journeyman who’s looking for experience and to build a reputation.

Job title: Project Manager

Project: PMCLINIC 2.0

Description: Lead the planning, brainstorming, organization and development of a new online community for the 1,000+ community of leaders, PMs and managers who reside on the legendary pmclinic. Objectives include taking the list out of the technological dark ages and onto the web, while retaining the stellar signal to noise ratio, and e-mail only options, subscribers cherish. It’s a huge opportunity to play a rare leadership role on a high visibility project in the tech-sector, software development and project management communities.

The current forum has a ghetto web home: https://stage.scottberkun.com/pmclinic/.

What you will get:

Skills required:

How to apply:

  1. Re-read the above, carefully this time.
  2. Send a brief note and a resume to info at stage.scottberkun.com/
  3. No specific experience required. Just need to convince me you’ll kick ass in this role.

After a few weeks on hiatus, the pm-clinic is back. With a vengeance. New tales of management challenges and great advice await.
This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

I was asked by to take over a troubled project. This group is managed by my boss’ peer so I am now dotted-line-reporting to him for this project. This
senior-level manager is not happy about being forced to use me. The project teams are strong but have been micro-managed by said manager who repeatedly
puts the cart before the horse – one of the major reasons the project is in trouble.

I, as the white knight,” am being asked to keep the listing ship from completely sinking. Expectations for getting it on track are high, while still meeting some of the originally set timelines.

How do I both manage this project and a sponsor who doesn’t want me as the PM?

-Signed, the white knight

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

Is innovation for innovation’s sake a good idea? I think not, but my new VP has it in his head that our entire organization needs to be more innovative – despite his lack of clarity about what that means. So all of the team leads (including myself) are like a pack of wolves, pacing and racing around our projects.

New ideas are flying all over the place (reorgs, new technologies, new directions), but progress on existing projects has stalled, morale is volatile (rising and falling daily), and there is a shortage on meaningful decisions about why we’re changing things, or how those changes will be made.

How can I help my VP sort out what innovation means? (Or is this some kind of leadership game where he’s testing us by watching our responses)? Or more cynically, protect my team and existing projects from this chaos until it passes?

– Innovate or die

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

A handful of managers that have worked together for years are good friends. One of them, the one with the least competent reputation, left over a year ago, and is now being hired back into the company as a perennial contractor (product manager).

Every time my team has interacted with him, across various contracts and on different projects, we’ve had some kind of performance problem. However given his connections, despite feedback to the contrary, he keeps getting rehired (generally with different teams each time).

What can I do, as a manager myself, to exorcise this ghost employee from my world?

– Signed, Haunted by a ghost employee

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

I’m a pm for a web development company – I have what we call a zombie: a project that lives on forever for no good reason. The client continually makes rounds of tiny changes, often to things where they can’t provide specific or actionable feedback so we can’t get it right the first time. The project scope (contract) of work, sadly, doesn’t have language that caps these things as they were unexpected. So, through either politics, influence, bands of garlic, or changing the process, how do you put a zombie
project to rest?

– Hunting project zombies

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

After two years as a general manager, building a team of 25 from scratch, my VP is showing me the door. More precisely, I’m being asked to find a role elsewhere in the company. Yes I’m devistated, but that’s not the point.

My challenge: how do I message my leaving why I’m leaving? Most of them came to the org because of me: I recruited them on the basis of my commitment to them and the project. I don’t want to be ugly and badmouth the VP, but I don’t want to lie either. How do I message this honestly, but create the least damage for the team and whoever has to replace me?

– Signed, trying to close the door (TCTD)

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

For about 16 months my big problem. in forming a new team, was finding top talent – but now that I’ve nailed that goal, I have an unexpectedly annoying problem: keeping top talent. The surprising downside to having rock star people is that they know they can easily find jobs elsewhere, and they demand more from me in terms of assignments and the challenge level of their projects than most of the people I’ve managed before.

I’m starting to think I’m overstaffed – my team has more talent than I really need for the kinds of projects we’re going to have over the next year.

Should I:

Signed, – Trying to keep top talent

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

One ongoing debate in my world is thick vs. thin specs.  The thick camp believes that specs need to be detailed (thick) and that specifications should be comprehensive to the point that most issues are well covered and that the spec can answer most questions programmers and testers have. The thin camp believes no one reads big specs and at best a spec should cover points of contention and basic principles, leaving the rest for the programmer/tester/etc. to interpret or ask for clarification.

Where do people stand on the thin vs. thick spec issue? Do specs in your org typically go for more than 10 pages (thick)? or less (thin)?

– Signed, Thick vs. thin

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

I manage a rapid prototyping team in for a major consumer software product. We partner with real dev teams from around the org, and explore out ideas they don’t have time for. The group is new and I’m under continual pressure from above to justify the group’s existence (a task of many middle managers) –  I’ve asked my team to think about ways to measure value, but I get the risks: people may game the measurements, or the measuring may kill the creative work – – but I’m asking anyway as I can use the ammunition.

So my challenge is how to satisfy the view of big management, which is measurement centric and the language of VPs, but also satisfy the needs for innovation, protecting the environment from passion killing rules and structure.

How can I be the bridge between these two views without being two-faced or deceptive about what’s going on? Or is this exactly what managers of innovative teams in more production centric organizations always have to do?

– Looking for the benevolent Janus

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

The manager for my team is one of the company founders. He’s smart, but oh man, is he annoying. He has a litany of habits that make my life, as a team leader, frustrating: from disrupting my authority in front of others, to changing his mind and then changing it back, to just being downright egotistical, snide and resistant to ideas from others. He is smart and does contribute, and listens about 1/3rd of the time, just enough to prevent the other founders from doing anything about him.

So I have to work with this man: he’s not going anywhere, and he has significant power over me, my team, and the company. So how can I protect myself and my team from his many less than delightful habits?

– Stuck in Annoyanceville

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

Our team has a monthly process called add/cuts, where all the head honchos get in a room, look at the feature lists, and decide what features to add and which to cut. These things are usually quite bloody, carnage heavy affairs – typically 80% cuts and 20% adds. It’s an ad-hoc meeting where we review goals, run the work item lists, and try to make things fit the schedule. Unfortunately it often falls into ritual feature killings, where each head honcho cuts things to prove to the others how hard core they are.

The result is that the meeting functions best to motivate people to finish work before these meetings (perhaps good), but also to skunk work, hiding work items, to avoid having them discussed in these meetings (which is bad).

I’m influential enough that I can propose a different way to run these feature level add/cut meetings. What should I propose?

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

I lead a small team of 6 – we’re paired with 3 other small teams, all reporting into the same group manager.

Problem #1: the group manager doesn’t have a vision. He’s vague and tends towards disinterest in leadership matters.
Problem #2: All of us leads have visions, but they’re different.
Problem #3: Leaders and founders seem content to let us fight out our respective visions in code.

I’ve run up this hill before – it’s not fun. I want to find another way to deal with the situation and I’m hoping pmc can help.

– Surviving the visionless manager

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

I’m a project leader in a research organization – as in a hard core blue sky R&D future thinking lab. We loosely organize around projects but our goals are the inverse of typical software: it’s the IP and the concepts we invent that people pay us for, not feature sets or code quality. Our releases to clients are vehicles for our concepts and research, but nothing more.

What I’m looking for are ways to apply project management skills to blue-sky, big think, projects. Can we improve the quality of our process and scheduling, or get more mileage out of the concepts we invent, but with a minimum impact on our ability to experiment, change directions, and go after big powerful ideas? What do things like specs, exit criteria and status meetings mean for a 100% proof of concept project?

– Flying in the blue sky

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

I’m a lead programmer on a web 2.0’ish startup. Our team of 7 released an alpha version last week and we’re planning the final release, and need to make partner date commitments for launch.

Our biggest debate is buffer. All of our experienced programmers have pet philsoophies about buffer and I’m looking for someone to dispell the myths and give real advice on: Should buffer be used at all? When? why? Where do you put it in the schedule? Do you tell the team? And what are common stupid things arrogant leads do with buffer that shoot themselves in the foot and how can we avoid?

thanks,

– Wannabe buffermaster (WB)

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

Times have changed at my company and I’m looking for a management role. I was hired as a software developer, but have picked up some project management work through promotions. Since I have no experience either interviewing potential PMs/managers or being interviewed myself, I don’t know what to expect in seeking out a FT management position.

What are three questions you ask of any project manager you interview? What is the minimum criteria to get a hire? How do you deal with ambiguities of assessing management skill, compared to something more easily demonstrated in the interview, like programming or design knowledge?

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

I have just joined as a Project Manager at a software house employing 130 people, 90 of which are involved in software. The engineers are talented but number of PMs is low and failed projects is high. CEO is technical, but sees PM is a discipline he has neglected for too long. Hence the board have hired myself and one other PM to help.

Many engineers are anti-management and believe they don’t need managing, but after 3 weeks I see major problems of out of control work, lost budgets and late schedules. Some engineers fear I’ve been hired to cut headcount and are anxious (though I anticipate that the opposite may be true).

My preliminary moves to add structure to projects has met great resistance: some engineers refused to attend a weekly team meeting.

How can I bring order to the chaos without resorting to the stick method? How can I get engineers to buy in to the Project Management ethos? I already feel I’ve alienated some by my job title, and I don’t want to do more damage.

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

In the company I work for, we have personal development discussions between manager and developers twice a year. One part of the discussion is goal setting for the next half year period, and I’m a new manager doing this for the first time.

Obviously, we want the goals to be measurable, realistic, specific, and all that. I am not that interested about general properties of good goals as I am confident (ok, arrogant 🙂 about those. Instead, I want to see real examples of goals that have worked well or well written goals that failed. Not team goals, but individual goals.

The whole personal goal thing is shrouded in mystery – no one ever shows real examples from real reviews for real people, and I hoped pm-clinic might have some people willing to anonymize goals from people on their team, prior teams or share some of their own goals.

I realize that goal setting is dependent on context and I don’t expect that looking at other people’s goals would be transferable as such. Instead, I hope to get new ideas and food for thought in this subject that is new to me, and for that reason good and bad examples (with light commentary) would be valuable. Thanks.

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

I’m a development lead in a high powered web development company. We beat competitors on speed and quality technology, and engineers like me do the closest thing to project management. We avoid specs and docs, working in small enough teams that fast communication is pretty easy. There is a strong anti-management vibe in the company, as well as a hyper proactive “do it now and fix it later” mentality, but those attitudes have served us really well – our company has been super successful.

The problem is that our organization has grown from 100 to 2000+ people in a handful of years. Many engineers work on several projects at a time, including lots of remote programmers. We have a high number of virtual teams and a super flat hierarchy – things that are liberating, but are suddenly annoying at times. The consensus driven approach we have isn’t as speedy as it was.

My dilemma has two parts:

Tactics: I’m more willing to try changes than many of my peers and reports. So how do I add in more management-y things, a little more structure and clearer division of ownership, without rocking the boat and being called a weenie? (Our lingo for fuddy-dutty management types). I fear it’s a one way ride: These things I’ll add will never be removed and it’s a downward spiral of over-management (And my team of engineers fears this too).

Strategy: How do you work to shift the culture the company was founded on and take pride in, when it’s not working as well anymore? I can’t say I’ve worked anywhere that handled this successfully – either the success ends, or people leave, whenever leaders try to mature the culture.