{"id":4252,"date":"2017-03-02T10:05:32","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T09:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=4252"},"modified":"2017-03-02T10:08:50","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T09:08:50","slug":"age-experience-and-project-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/4252\/","title":{"rendered":"Age, Experience, and Project Management"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a thread<\/a> over at ZMan’s place somebody left the following comment:<\/p>\n

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The point appears to be that a young engineer entering into the workforce should shut up and listen to his elders and betters instead of getting ideas above his station about wanting to be a project manager. From experience I can say that this attitude is common in industry, or at least it was 15-20 years ago.<\/p>\n

At first glance it makes sense. It is unthinkable that somebody with no experience should be put in charge of those who have twenty years under their belts, and I know too well the disaster that can unfold when over-educated bright young things are given the run of a place at the expense of older people who know what they’re doing. The problem is this assumes the problem is peoples’ age rather than simple shit management.<\/p>\n

There is no reason why somebody young and with very little experience cannot be a project manager. The key is to give them a project which is small, easily manageable, and not very important. It can be something as simple as reorganising a warehouse. The idea is they understand the fundamentals of project delivery early on, when failure doesn’t matter and there are plenty of people to jump in and help out. Chances are on the first day he’ll start issuing instructions to one of the old hands who will roundly put him in his place, and he’ll have learned a valuable lesson: some of the old hands are worth listening to, and you need them. But that doesn’t mean they ought to be in charge. He’ll also learn about planning, preparation, organisation, reporting, budgets, etc. in an environment that is more forgiving than he can expect in future. If he does well he can be given a slightly bigger project, and then another, and so on across a whole career.<\/p>\n

The skills required in a project manager are wildly different from those required to be a good discipline engineer. The two require different personalities for a start. There is no reason to think that one must prove oneself as an engineer before becoming a project manager. I would advise that one still needs to be an engineer, or technical at least. You wouldn’t want a historian turning his hand to industrial project management. But you wouldn’t want an engineer with 20 years’ experience doing so either.<\/p>\n

The mistake a lot of companies make is taking their best, most experienced engineer and giving him his first project management role at age 40. The skillset is completely different, but companies have this annoying habit of thinking project management is something anyone can do on the fly. What happens is the engineer hates the role – he’d rather have stayed as an engineer, but likes the increased pay, prestige, and “manager” title – and does a lousy job. All of the fundamentals of project management are completely new to him and he has been put on a large, complex project with many pitfalls. This is no place to be learning the ropes. His reaction will be to hunker down into what he knows best – the minute details – and start trying to micromanage everything, because he doesn’t know how to delegate, doesn’t trust anyone, and believes everyone is winging it as much as he is. Micromanagement is a sure sign the person in question is not confident in their own abilities; those who are don’t micromanage, because the idea of somebody being competent is not alien to them. You can often\u00a0tell what discipline a project manager comes from because they try to do all the design of that area themselves. Meanwhile the project management tasks – particularly communication and organisation – don’t get done.<\/p>\n

The genuine old hand engineers know this. Provided they are used properly and treated with respect, they have no problem reporting to young whippersnapper project managers. This is unsurprising when you consider the military: young men with no experience are taught a specific set of skills and are then put in command of much older and more experienced men (the NCOs) with a different set of skills. It is vital that each respects the other’s role and experience for it to work, but it’s been proven to work over centuries. The decent old hands will help the young, ambitious guys not shoot them down.<\/p>\n

The sort of old hands who come out with the remarks like those in the comment I quote above are almost always bitter individuals whose own ordinariness or incompetence has left them in the same position for the past two decades and all they have to fall back on is their time served. They make the mistake of equating time served with experience, and compound it by believing such experience is more important than competence. One of the best project managers I worked with was inexperienced, but boy was he competent. I’ve lost count of the number of “experienced” project managers I’ve come across whose entire career was a litany of blithering incompetence.<\/p>\n

I’d say to any young engineer, treat any old hand engineer with a healthy skepticism until you’ve figured out those who are worth talking to. And then you listen to everything they have to say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a thread over at ZMan’s place somebody left the following comment: The point appears to be that a young engineer entering into the workforce should shut up and listen to his elders and betters instead of getting ideas above … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4252"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4252"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4256,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4252\/revisions\/4256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}