adam bien's blog
Who knows a good IT-Manager, or A Good Manager Is Able To Manage Everything 📎
In real world projects, we do not only have a sort of voodoo consultants, but also a special kind of IT-Managers and project's leaders. They believe the following statement "Good Manager Is Able To Manage Everything", is very like "A Good Developer Is Able To Develop In Every Programming Language" :-). The problem with this approach is: such managers are only able to ask questions and wait for the answers - without understanding the context. Because they do not (and often also do not want) understand, how software engineering works, they try to compare it with another disciplines. Common fallacies like: offshore is cheaper, or we can deliver faster with more developers, or good analysts and architects are more important than developers came from this understanding.
In my opinion, it is nearly impossible, to manage software projects, without understanding it. I met several managers, but only few (actually two), were really good. The big distinction is: "good" managers try to understand, communicate and react to the challenges in the software development, without COS strategies. They are accepted by developers and customers.
So IT-manager should be only another role in the software development lifecycle, with added value to the result. In this case he should not only work with MS project, PowerPoint and Visio, but also trying to understand the developers and especially TRUST them.