Hey guys, I would like your opinions on a work problem that I’ve had in all of my recent workplaces. They’ve all been matrix management with projects, which means that I report to my manager but I work for the project manager on projects. It’s a very common set up. What I’ve observed is that the management team overall is very bad about managing workloads of their reports.
For example, in my earlier job I would have to sit around for months with nothing to do, and then suddenly all of the project managers (3 or 4 of them) would want me to start work on their new projects simultaneously. I would usually have to tell one of them that I couldn’t work on his project because it would spread me too thin and I’d be dropping balls right and left. After I finished the assignments, I’d go back to more months with no work to do.
I’m seeing the same thing in my current job. If I ask for work during the slow times, I still have to sit around for a few days until they get back to me with something I can work on. Then I either finish it in a couple days and go back to being bored, or I get stuck waiting for call backs or email replies from people I need to collaborate with. These are jobs where I’m not allowed to identify my own tasks and get them done. Believe me, I’ve tried some (in my opinion) innocuous process improvement that has been roundly smacked down, and drafting internal documentation that nobody ever reads.
When I see colliding projects coming “down the pike”, I do say something to my manager. Usually nothing happens as a result, I still get assigned to too many project simultaneously, and I think I’m getting the reputation of someone who is negative. For example, right now I know that early next year we have two different week-long meetings with external customers that I’ll be expected to prepare presentations for and attend/participate, a large internal project demanding a lot of my time, a few smaller projects, and I’ll still be expected to respond to customer inquiries by email.
None of this is about me specifically - it happens to my coworkers as well. This week one of my coworkers quit suddenly which brought to light the fact that her workload was outrageously untenable (while I was sitting around bored!) It’s partly her fault for not speaking up until she had a melt-down, but I would think a sensible manager would also spot the train in the tunnel bearing down on her. We are required to do weekly status reports and have weekly 1 on 1’s with our manager.
Am I idealistic or completely off base in thinking that the management team should be talking to each other and have a running resource plan to keep an even workload for everyone? My current company has monthly manager meetings but I have no clue what they talk about in them. It’s apparently not projects resource requirements, or project status or anything about team workloads. (I’ve asked my manager what they talk about and she evaded the question with something mumbled about “not much”.)
“I have eight different bosses right now. That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled… that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.”
I worked in a place like that. It’s a pretty typical practice in a lot of consulting and other professional services firms. Especially in technology.
Part of it is due to the chicken and egg problem of hiring resources and selling work (or funding projects if internal). Part of it is a lack of coordination between sales, delivery and staffing.
Ideally what should be happening is:
-Your company should have specific sales targets for landing new work.
-HR should be hiring talent at a pace to keep up with new projects and replacing losses due to natural attrition.
-Your PMO and resource managers should be coordinating future staffing based on projects sold and in the pipeline.
-They should also be making sure projects are appropriately staffed and resources are sufficiently load-balanced.
But, unfortunately your company sounds like my old one in that it’s run by dumbfucks. So what actually happens is:
-Sales just makes promises regardless of whether they can be delivered.
-Project management/delivery just grabs whoever is on hand with little to no coordination and badgers them into working longer hours
-Staff work long hours trying to keep up.
-Most of the projects fail and half the staff and PMs quit in a year.
My company tried “matrix” management for a short while.
All it did was kill responsibility. Each guy could say, “No, it was the other guy’s decision.”
We scrapped it after less than five months and went back to conventional “tree diagram” hierarchy.
(There are still a handful of informal “dotted line” relationships, but those are mostly personal. A couple of big department managers play golf together, so it’s more likely they’ll work together well. Meanwhile, the V.P. of Finance and the V.P. of Operations don’t like each other…)
Well, yes and no. I was a FTE (not a 1099 contractor) in both places. It’s lack of coordination between managers and project managers for sure. I don’t think it’s a staffing issue. All the projects hit at the same time, and then we all sit around websurfing in between projects until the next work flurry begins.
It’s only annoying because they KNOW the projects are coming. I’ve been in meetings where they talk about them, like Project A is going to start mid-January, we’ll launch project B in June, project C starts in early February, Project D kicks off in the last week of December, etc.
I have PM experience, so checking-in here. I used to work with my dept directors on a massive spreadsheet that accounted for everyone in the dept (150+ people), and could be used to track their time down to each week of the year. When assignments were made or new work started, anyone going over some threshold would get flagged, and that was supposed to cause re-planning or re-prioritizing. But what ended up happening is the Directors simply adjusted their resource estimates down to make the flag go away, without actually prioritizing or adjusting the work load. A complete waste of time, and we eventually gave it up. It was also very resource intensive to maintain. I recommend not going this way.
You need to have a frank discussion with your manager - the person you report to, not the Project Manager. Tell this person when you are starting to get piled-on that you are full and need help prioritizing your work. The answer cannot be that everything is top priority - if they say that, you need to find another job because your boss is not doing their job. Every organization has priorities.
Don’t depend on the management team to keep an eye out for resource overload - in this case be a squeaky wheel - enuf to get attention, but not so much to get replaced.
A PM sees the work thru their own lens - their project is the most important thing and other projects are secondary. I tell people this up front in a joking way, but it tends to be true, and a good PM will find ways to make their project more important than someone else’s. For example, upon assembly of a new project team, I would send a general goal about the project to each team member and their manager, and require that the goal (supporting my project) became part of their annual performance evaluation. Your raise/bonus is now tied to the success of the project, and your manager is on board.
As a project team member, you can ask each PM for this, and get your manager to support it (mgmt. buy-in is critical). Once you get too many goals for your goal plan, then your manager needs to step-in and help prioritize. It’s their job to do this, and can force the conversation in that management team meeting.
I am not suggesting this will end the overload/dry spells, but it at least will get people talking about resource leveling and prioritization.
It seems like tha managers don’t have a good idea of the loads of their reports, either too much or too little. That happens all the time because the managers are busy with their manager stuff and because the workers don’t let them know if they are overloaded.
When you are bored, see if you can figure out what other people are doing, and listen for them complaining about being too busy. Offer to help, and if this is accepted check with the managers.
If you have too much, and someone wants you to do more, just list your tasks and ask the manager which of them you should stop doing to do his or her job.
An old boss of mine said that if someone says your budget is going to be cut never, ever say it is okay and you can manage. Tell them what you are going to stop doing. Make sure it is the one your customers want the most. Getting assignments is similar.
Resource management is the problem, If you report to multiple different project managers on various projects, they should be negotiating with your line manager (perhaps bidding in a resource planning group) for blocks of your resource.
Your time gets booked and you work on the project. If anyone comes along with a more urgent demand, they should again be negotiating with the resource planners (including your manager) for changing the schedule.
A resource plan allows your manager to see how you’re spending your time - it allows project managers to get in proper priority order, and it allows all stakeholders to see and agree who gets elbowed out of the way to do what.
It’s a tough sell to a business where everyone is just jostling and cutting in line, because everyone has the perception that if they have to wait in line, they’ll wait longer - and they all think they should be first. In reality, the people doing the work have a certain capacity and all the jostling and cutting in line is hugely unproductive. Project managers and their customers need to realise that chaos is not a good way to get anything done.
I have come to the conclusion that 99% of salespeople, managers and project managers are lazy idiots. Since you have lazy idiots running these organizations, you have to expect that projects will be lazily delivered idiotically.
In spite of all this stuff out there regarding Agile, PMI, PRiSM, PRINCE2 and other methodologies, the way projects actually get done is some project is approved based on whatever budget and resource load is politically expedient. Then the project team will work themselves to death while a project manager writes weekly status reports to some executive yelling about project delays,
The reason for this is that if a PM puts together a detailed project plan (mostly based on conjecture anyway) that shows that in 6 months the project will miss it’s deadline by another couple of months, most executives will assume the PM has 6 months to figure out how to fix it.
My experience is that its driven by a couple of things:
Budget cycles - money can’t get spent until it gets released - and most companies release all the money at once.
Staffing constraints in other areas. The people upstream have do do something and it backs up. Then the floodgates open - someone realizes there is a bottleneck and fixes it.
Lack of enterprise PM systems. Ideally, your people needs are scheduled in something like Clarity - and when Jenny is going to need to work 400 hours a week in order for the projects to complete, someone should notice and start reapportioning work. Either this isn’t happening at all, or it happens but no one looks at it
Executives who are poorly tied to reality. I had a project which had to be done by date X (and the date was TIGHT), sit for two months waiting approval because some executive needed an answer. When it finally was approved and I pushed the date back, they had a hard time understanding why and argued about it “but you said two months ago it could be done by December!” Then when the date was moved and we got started, the team I had got overallocated, so I went back to push again. They didn’t understand why we still couldn’t get it done - even though the team had been given a higher priority project. “Well, have them work harder. Tell them to come in on Saturdays. Tell them to work longer hours.” Well, guess what happens when you do that. You then go back and ask for more time because they quit. Then you quit.
Oh, the last company I PMed for - your project had to get executive approval to clear gates. The committee (yes, it was a committee) only met once a month. Your sponsoring exec had to be there. Executives would skip the meeting all the damn time - and there were six gates to clear. That meant that even a simple project would take six months - assuming that the committee had a quorum to actually clear the gate every month and your executive showed up.
So you’d get to a point where you had to stop until you got approval to proceed. It might be six or seven weeks before that approval would arrive. And since teams tended to be tied to functional area, when the exec would finally show to clear the gate, four or five project might all restart at once. - Idiotic.
Oh, and highly regulated industry. There was no skipping the gates.
Yeah, the methodologies only work if everyone is on board with them, and that’s as rare as rocking horse shit.
The other problem is that, having handed over control of a project to a project manager, executives can very easily fall foul of the illusion that the floor is clear and everything is ready for their next grand idea to be jammed through the pipeline,
The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim is a fun (for a business management book), light read that touches on some of these issues from a software engineering perspective. Basically, management needs to adopt some kind of minimal project management process that actually keeps track of what everyone is doing, and what the priority of those tasks are. Since it’s very difficult to push operational and procedural changes on people, the first step in the book is a simple board full of sticky notes called a Kanban board where you just write down tasks and put people’s names on them. Ideally you would use actual project management software but some companies are too incompetent to handle something like that.
JcWoman, do you work for a government contractor by any chance? They face a lot of regulations about how money can be spent, and it often comes in at inconvenient times. Other companies have less of an excuse for poor project management :).