> This is no different to the fact that a project manager
> with no knowledge of construction is a poor choice for
> a construction project

As it has been pointed out, a manager's job is bound by "people skills", not by technical skills. You have to understand how the game development process works, what are the key points in your organization, and how to affect them to reach your goal. It has nothing to do with how good you are with C++ or 3DSMax. Granted, having a game development experience helps getting some credibility, but it is easier to have an experienced manager learn the intricacies of the game development cycle than it is for turing an experienced game developer into a manager.

-cb

Once again, I appear to have been unclear. I am not saying that a good PM for software must be a good coder, or even a mediocre coder, any more than I'm saying that a good construction PM must be a good bricklayer. I'm saying that there is a level of understanding of the underlying processes of the job at hand required to be a good manager in both that preclude just hiring a non-specialist manager and expecting them to perform well without a team that can effectively support their lack of knowledge.

People who study IT tend to study IT management. IT is not ditch digging and it is not factory work. The processes, resources, dependencies and relationships are not obvious to the untrained observer and certainly not to a business school graduate who has never been involved in creating software. I am not belittling the difficulties of management, I am only expressing a belief that the area deserves and needs specialist knowledge.

If you believe that a manager can pick up several years worth of IT training and experience more easily that an IT expert can apply their knowledge and training to managing a team, then we are just going to have to disagree (unless you are merely making the point that some people are unsuited to management due to their personality -- in which case I'd agree, but point out that most managers are unsuited to IT work because they simply aren't clever enough or interested in the subject enough), but that was never my point. My point is simply that managing software development is a specialised area of management, and in my experience, people who don't pay it the respect it deserves tend to get themselves and their projects into an unpleasant mess.

> My point is simply that managing software development
> is a specialised area of management

Project management, whether IT or building construction is still project management. If you look again at Obscure's list of things a project manager does, you will notice there are no significant differences between building construction and software development from a project management perspective. The skillset is transferable.

> If you believe that a manager can pick up several years
> worth of IT training and experience {...}

You are comparing IT pros without project management experience with provent project managers without an IT background; and you are discarding the latter. I'm not convinced of this position; both paths to successful software project managers are valid.

**Demonstrated** leadership and communication abilities are at the core of better project managers, regardless of the field.

-cb

I'm not sure the list actually demonstrates a set of transferable skills as much as a set of transferable task descriptions, for example:

- Working with the designer and team leads to turn the design into a task list.
- Working with the team leads to turn the task list into a schedule.

Except without knowing about the field, the PM can't understand the completeness of this list/schedule, the dependencies in it, the risks associated or the effort required. In other words, his entire contribution to this would be "Guys, make me up a schedule, please." That's if he's sensible enough to recognise that he can't actually do the job himself.

- Assigning tasks to members of the team.

Without knowledge of the field, the PM would have no clue how to do this and again would be reliant on simply asking the team to divide the jobs amongst themselves.

- Reviewing tasks completed by the team (or not as the case may be) and updating the schedule as appropriate.

Applying what knowledge of deliverables and quality assurance processes?

Yes, I'm being harsh, and yes there are transferable skills at the core of managing projects. Sure, in all instances, the answer is that a good PM uses the expertise available to him, but in software development this often degenerates into one of two situations: either the team ends up baby-sitting the PM and much time is wasted or the PM keeps making bad choices because he doesn't ask for support or because the team isn't actually prepared or capable of giving it.

Anyway, I'm sure that we're not going to agree on this, and nor do we have to. I still don't advise the original poster to treat managing a software project as "just another project", because my experience (both being managed and as a manager) doesn't support that as being a sensible approach.

In other words, his entire contribution to this would be "Guys, make me up a schedule, please."

Quote:Without knowledge of the field, the PM would have no clue how to do this and again would be reliant on simply asking the team to divide the jobs amongst themselves.

Quote:either the team ends up baby-sitting the PM and much time is wasted or the PM keeps making bad choices because he doesn't ask for support or because the team isn't actually prepared or capable of giving it.

What you mentioned is really great advice actually, in the form of negative examples, and that i really appreciate.

My own thoughts is that well, you will always have your pointy head dilbert styled managers, and you will also have your slightly more intelligent chaps, who can and will actually do a bit of research prior, and learn the details of the project.

At surface, it seems common sense to get a professional IT project manager to do an IT project. However my own thoughts is that a) it will add to cost. 5% - 10% is still a cost b) expertise. It's hard to gauge how good a person actually is until you worked with him. c) dependancy. Without doing it yourself, you will never learn, and will always have a dependancy on the PM, for future projects too, and by then, he will demand a higher cost...

Of course, there too are advantages to having a PM, which i think all of you guys see.

Quote:Original post by mwtb
I'm not sure the list actually demonstrates a set of transferable skills as much as a set of transferable task descriptions, for example:

Spoken like a true project manager! :D (spotting where people are misdescribing things in misleading ways is one of their skills)

Quote:
Except without knowing about the field, the PM can't understand the completeness of this list/schedule, the dependencies in it,

Ah. Well, this is where *good* project managers are differentiated from *mediocre* ones (I would call them "crap", but others are more generous than I).

I've worked with some very good p-m's, and some programme-managers (like project manager, only on a bigger scale: e.g. managing projects with a total of e.g. 300 people on them, or sometimes as many as a thousand in extreme cases).

One thing that is very obvious is that they have "methodical" down to a fine art: they know very little about any particular industry, but are very good at producing all-encompassing lists that methodically cover every single aspect of something - usually of something they have no personal experience of.

Different ones do this in different ways. Some are just very good at finding the real experts in a team, and distinguishing between BS and genuine facts. Others are excellent analysts, very good at simply talking to everyone on the team and producing a near-perfect description of every process without ever having done any of those processes themself.

So, with a good PM, this:

Quote:
Without knowledge of the field, the PM would have no clue how to do this and again would be reliant on simply asking the team to divide the jobs amongst themselves.

...never happens. This is one of the reasons why I would (and do) always employ a professional PM to do the PM's job. Worth their weight in gold? Yeah, definitely.

As Obscure points out (and I think this is a VERY important point, so I'm going to underline it :)), if you don't hire one, someone will end up doing the job anyway. Often, several people will end up doing bits of the job, with plenty of overlap (because they're not official and so there's not much communication: they're just doing things they discover they have to do, and often several will think of doing the same thing independently), and both chaos and wasted time - and even pointless arguments and tension.