Why you should not work as a project

I often hear from people who just want to get into IT that “if you are a humanist and don’t want to go into QA, then there is one way – to become a project manager.” It seems to them that a working day looks like this: held 2-3 meetings, drank 3 cups of coffee, built a Gantt, motivated the team and can go home.

I’ve been working as a project manager for over 10 years now and I’ve seen many colleagues who quit their profession and went off to do whatever they wanted just to put out their always-burning ass. I consoled sobbing project colleagues, I was kicked out of the client’s office building by security guards with flashlights, because it closed at 11 pm, and I still had to work.

This article is an attempt to tell those who want to try to become a project manager about the underside of the profession and the problems that you will definitely encounter and which it is better to know about in advance.

The paradox of the project

On paper and in project management courses, projects are portrayed as adherents of the Holy Triangle (budget/timeline/scope), who manage these three components on a daily basis and at the same time constantly monitor Quality – the heart of the triangle. That’s true, but IT projects often encounter the following in practice:

• There is no direct control over the budget: you get developers (outsourced or internal team) for it, but they are not your subordinates, they have their own bosses. Consequence: you often cannot replace, fire or dismiss an employee directly, and the employee’s manager will not always be on your side even if deadlines are missed.

• Deadlines (especially for features that are important for the company) are set by management and are often “fixed”; in order to meet them you have to act creatively.

• Content tends to swell to unimaginable proportions, but it’s impossible to fit everything into a deadline and you need to agree on specific features in the MVP.

This means that you will often manage everything on a project, without actually managing anything directly; you will have to try a lot with words and deeds to keep the project within the edges of the triangle. It's especially difficult when you have little experience and spend a lot of time learning project management tools and best practices, learning a lot on the fly.

Therefore, do not delude yourself about the requirements for a profession: if a profession does not require hard skills like programming, then this automatically means high requirements for soft skills and planning.

What are the most stressful things that a new project will definitely face?

Uncertainty

One of the main tasks of a project manager is to reduce the amount of chaos in the system, but the universe will constantly throw up tasks: your developers will get sick, priorities will change, requirements will be rewritten, tasks will take longer to develop than planned. Each design test requires a response, a search for solutions, compromises and often conflicts with others.

I know people who get nervous when they have to choose a bar for the evening, if you are one of them – in choosing a career, think again 🙂

To manage uncertainty, you must learn to: collect consistent business requirements, write detailed technical specifications, and manage customer expectations. It is unlikely that you will be able to get rid of stress; think about regular physical activity in your life, this greatly reduces stress.

Working with the team and stakeholders

Often you will be responsible for the success of the project, and given the project paradox from the point above, you will not have complete control over the situation.

There will most likely be difficulties with the team, especially in the first stages. The team expects the manager to avoid problems as much as possible: inflated requirements, radical changes in requirements, pressing deadlines, and anything that provokes stress. If you solve their problems, you will be loved and respected. What you need for this: study processes, look for ways to improve them and implement them together with the team, not forgetting about good planning.

The situation with the customer is a little different, because their interests are often opposite to the interests of the development team – to do more in the shortest possible time and with the possibility of changing requirements at any time. If you don’t meet deadlines or do things poorly, you will have conflicts, even aggressive conversations (this happens too).

To resolve everything competently, you will need to balance between the interests of the parties, find compromises, strengthen horizontal and personal connections with all participants, establish processes and eliminate bottlenecks in them. It will be very helpful if you have advanced technical knowledge, which will allow you to convey customer requests immediately in the required form to the developers, so information loss will be minimal.

Knowledge in related fields

Very often you will have to deal not only with project management, but also with other tasks and areas of activity, including the study of related areas of knowledge: design, business analysis, analytics and even programming. No, you don’t need to program, but you need to understand the basics: variables, operations, distinguishing front-end from back-end.

The specifics of any IT specialty are like a foreign language with its own terms, grammar and logic. You can't manage people effectively unless you understand this at least at a basic level. A pleasant side effect of learning a foreign language: native speakers will be pleased to communicate with you, their attitude will improve, and results will be easier to achieve.

You can develop in this endlessly; it is best to read/watch videos about subject areas and communicate with specialists in the process of your work, delving into the essence of what they do.

Afterword

Don't think that project is an easy entry into IT, you will have to learn a lot of things besides the Gantt chart to become a full-fledged specialist. But on the other hand, looking at a working project, on which several months of painstaking work of dozens of people have been spent, is a spectacle on the level of a burning fire 🙂

If you have experience working as a project manager and have already changed your profession, or, on the contrary, have fallen in love with it even more, leave a comment, it’s interesting to hear your opinion about the profession.