Comments on: The Accidental Project Manager – Part 1

By: Picking a Project Manager Successor « Fear No Project – A Project Management Blog

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:04:39 +0000

[...] my posts. Picking just a couple examples, you may want to check out The Ethical Project Manager and The Accidental Project Manager. To answer question 2, I suggest just a couple traits the absence of which spell disaster for a [...]

By: Manage your career like a project—Finding a Project Manager mentor « Fear No Project – A Project Management Blog

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 21:32:46 +0000

[...] April 10, 2010 — Bruce McGraw Wow- thanks for the response to my post on “the accidental PM”! I have received several inquiries about other job titles and how they should handle their [...]

By: Joel

Joel — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:56:06 +0000

Excellent two part post. It’s interesting to note the parallels between becoming an accidental Project Manager and becoming an accidental Software Developer. When companies need a quick, cheap solution they will often pull people that are smart and adaptable into either role, but as others have pointed out – you will definitely get a different result from a trained, experienced professional.

Joel
http://www.webucator.com

By: Brian Mossing

Brian Mossing — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:49:50 +0000

Bruce, great post. Good resources, and it made me think (again) about why companies even rely on accidental PMs instead of a professional PM. One conclusion I’ve come to is that project management gets a bad rap sometimes because some things are easier to quantify than others.

For example, it seems easy to quantify the cost of creating documentation. The time it takes to create the document and the actual physical output are readily quantifiable. Then people say, “Project management is just creating documentation that never gets read.” (Sometimes a valid complaint, btw.)

Or here’s another one. “Why do we have to pay for this person (the PM) when we could get a couple of us together and knock this thing out?” Also sometimes valid since it’s easy to see the PM and quantify their time but not always so easy to see and quantify their value.

Of course project management is a deep and complex profession, but it’s not so easy to quantify the less visible things a PM does like

- Focusing communication on the right topics and with the right people
- Keeping a project on schedule by motivating people to do work when the PM doesn’t directly supervise those people
- Getting the right people to act on a problem when everyone thinks it’s someone else’s job

I think it’s getting better though. Time will tell.

By: Pawel Brodzinski

Pawel Brodzinski — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:53:47 +0000

Actually project management job can be very rewarding and unwinding. The problem is still many people make their way to project management by accident and pretty often they aren’t best candidates to do the job. They just haven’t taken a step back when they should.

This is however more a problem of organizations which choose their PMs randomly than just people themselves. After all we can always ultimately take a step back and change a job.

Attitude toward project management is no surprise to me. This has two sources – one is rather poor quality of project management especially among accidental-PMs another is general disregard for non-developers in IT (quality engineers know exactly what I’m talking about). It is a role of management to work on people to change their approach but unfortunately management also often neglects that.

If the situation is your concern there are two ways to change it: either show your worth or change a job. The former tastes damn good if you ask me.