There are certain things I believe in business. One is that you need to know when to choose your battles. The other is that you have to disseminate relevant information so that people know why they have to do something that is pretty self explanatory to you because of what you know.
Perfect example: At another position in my career, we were told to put our time in as salary employees into Niku, then Clarity. You would have to go through training to use these tools and from an engineers perspective it was a complete waste of time since most of our project schedules should have been self explanatory. We were never told what the big picture was and why these tools were being used to track the time. Looking back from the eyes of a project manager, whomever was tracking the time and cost and earned value should have explained what the point of this tool was for, but they just figured everyone should be using it.
One thing about technical people? No one likes to do things that there’s no “reason” for and if you don’t provide a reason for it, then it’s not good enough. And the PM should have said that it was to track the amount of money we were spending against what we were making. It was that simple, but yet no one ever bothered with the disconnect.
I believe that this is the duty of a good project manager. An instructor of mine once told me that a PM’s position is communicating ninety percent of the time. I’d like to go one step further, and say that the PM’s position is also communicating the right information ninety percent of the time.
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