Suvery Question
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TridentWhite wrote:
Always and unequivocally we achieve exactly the number of milestones my project manager of the month thinks I should be achieving. Luckily he/she/it doesn't have any way of measuring completion, nor do they usually have an understanding of what the milestone actually means. In fact on occassion when my PM changes I will make up a few milestones that were already complete and set those as my goals (when the PM actually lets us set our own goals/milestones). This gives me the time to go back and fix some rushed code. Luckily there is no actual plan for the project so there are no "real" milestones, the powers that be just seem to like knowing that milestones (real or imagined) are being reached.
Although humorous, unfortunately I believe this is the real truth. The other extreme is the current project that I am working on, which has a single milestone - project complete. As one would expect, we have push that date around a few times. If you could give a single piece of advice to your PM what would it be?
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Regeretably, I have found that it is usually not the PM's fault. The fault usually lays in faulty requirements. Most PMs actually do the best they can with what they have. Also most of my PMs have been brought into the project late and usually aren't overly familiar with the project and most of the information was undocumented word-of-mouth. My one piece of advice is simply either go back to programming or learn how to program. Most of my PMs have had very little programming experience and can only judge a project's progress on visible UI attributes (of course this also applies to their bosses). They then make the assumption that programmers are incredibly lazy because the front end progresses slower than the back end.
Happiness is knowing that somewhere out there, there is a bullet with your name on it.