A manager has one role: to make decisions. Good managers can make decisions, aren’t afraid of making them. Bad managers are afraid, and either don’t/won’t make decision, or continually re-decide based upon the fear du jour.

Project managers fighting over resources? Management hasn’t prioritized projects. Workers confused as to which manager to listen to? The group manager hasn’t established a viable organization (management hierarchy). Frequent context-switching? Again, group manager either hasn’t prioritized AND hasn’t established a viable organization, or he keeps re-deciding because he is afraid he was wrong with his last decision. It all reduces to lack of competence at the primary responsibility of decision-making.

Maybe the real problem is how we choose managers. Often the best manager may not be the most technically astute person on the team, yet that’s how we usually choose managers (by promoting the individuals with the best skills in a particular function).

Hopefully, the cultural paradigm inspired by Agile will force us to revisit how we choose managers, and what we expect from them.

After all this environment probably starts a ltr of projects and finishes few or even none.

Cheers

And one more thing form the other side of a barricade. A manager who is responsible for project management, software development etc asks decision-makers which project is the most important and the answer is “all of them.” I used to reply “it does actually mean all our projets are equally unimportant” and risked “not a team player” label. Anyway, that’s the early harbinger of management debt. The symptoms seen by the team appear usually a bit later.

The organization is run in crisis mode, as the staff all piles on the “Crisis of the moment,” which is quickly forgotten when the next crisis emerges.