One of my favorite shows on television is America's Funniest Home Videos. One of the winning videos is a little boy who is playing Director for the story of Little Bunny Foo Foo. I was watching that again last night and thinking about how he reminded me of one of my counterparts on a project a couple of years ago. I was the Assistant PM and he was the PM on the State side of the project. In the State of Missouri you generally have a PM on the Consultant side and one on the State side.
This man liked to Micro Manage his people, and his consultants. He wanted to know every time a programmer started a new module. He had to review every e-mail that went out before you could send it. When I was working on a report, he literally came into my office every five minutes for an update. After the fifth time, when he asked "How far are you now?" I replied, "Not as far as I would have been if you hadn't interrupted me again." Ohhh. That did not go well. The final straw was when he called me into his office and informed me that I was taking four bathroom breaks per day at an average of 2.5 minutes each. That meant that I was "wasting" 50 minutes of his time each week and that he was considering docking my hours for that time.
That was the straw that broke the camels back for me. Rarely do I lose my composure with a client, but I did that day. I informed him that I was on high blood pressure medication which caused me to have frequent bathroom trips, and that if he didn't like the fact that he had to let me either use the restroom or pee in the floor of my cube, then he had better get someone else in there to fill my position.
Just like the Director who blew the whistle and expected his brother and sister to jump, this man had ridden me too hard and micromanaged me to death. In the video clip the brother blows his whistle and expects his younger brother and sister to come running to do exactly what he wants. Then when they don't perform to his expectations he yells at them and blames them for messing everything up. At the end of the clip you see the Director brother sitting in a recliner, blowing his whistle, and no-one answering.
By the end of the project this manager had done that to himself with the micromanagement of his team. The team turnover was tremendous. We had one programmer that came in for two days and then left for the east coast, telling the manager to kiss his nether regions. The communications on the project became so cumbersome that they were almost non-existant. And finally the PM and myself went to our prospective companies and told them that the project was doomed to fail and we wanted out.
This PM on the state side wasn't the only problem the project had, but the culture of micromanagement at this agency was rampant throughout the staff and contributed to the circumstances. Users were not consulted on the project and buy in was never acheived. They had the project shoved down their throats, much to their dismay. The project sponsor was a political pet who was weak and wishy washy. Policy conflicts, Political Power Plays, and the lack of a clear understanding of the goals made everything a moving target. The project was started poorly, inherited by a team who came in too late to change it, and was doomed from the beginning.
What could have been done to save it? The first step would have been for the PM to step back and let his consultants do what they were hired to do. Work competently and efficiently without micro management. Stop the communications killing micro management of e-mails and phone calls. One of the most important things about being a PM is knowing when to let your people do their thing and when to reign them in.
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