Too many managers. Why are there so many managers? A year-end rant. 2

[Fasteddie82]

I work in engineering at Large Defense Contractor Inc. I’m a mid-level engineer, just your basic dude-with-a-degree-and-some-experience, down in the trenches doing the day-to-day engineering work. The work itself is enjoyable. Cutting edge technology, many different applications, and relatively fast-paced (as fast-paced as defense work goes, at least). Engineering is run as a typical “matrix” organization, where you are owned by a “homeroom” manager, who then assigns you as needed to different “project” managers to work different projects.

I’ve read criticisms of the matrix system before, but I feel like it’s a pretty good way to go about things, if everyone is doing their job correctly. Project Managers should be advocating getting their projects completed, Homeroom Managers should be advocating that established design and test processes are followed, and ideally they both meet in the middle to make sure the work gets done, profit is made, and the customer is happy.

Instead, the roles seem to shake out like this:

Project Manager: Doesn’t have a deep technical background. Chief concerns are 1.) Are we burning the hours as fast as we said we would? and b.) Are we keeping to the schedule?

Homeroom Manager: Also lacks a strong technical background. Chief concerns are 1.) Keep the Project Manager happy; and give him/her whatever they want, regardless if it follows good engineering practice. 2.) Minimize the amount of work that the Homeroom Manager has to do.

This arrangement becomes frustrating. However, my biggest ire is saved for a third type of “manager,” who I’ve realized is frighteningly prevalent at Large Defense Contractor Inc. I’ll call him/her “Self-Designated Manager,” or SDM for short.

SDM is a worker-bee engineer who aspires to be a manager, primarily because they have found they don’t enjoy the day-to-day work of being an engineer. An SDM has typically decided that the best way to achieve their goals of management is to insert themselves into a management role in whatever project they are currently working. This often happens when someone is designated an Integrated Process Team (IPT) lead. At which point they wash their hands of doing any sort of technical work, and instead try to “manage” the work of other engineers.

So, now there are Project Managers, Homeroom Managers, and SDMs. All with limited technical background and all trying to “manage” a project to completion.

For those of us down in the trenches at the “worker-bee” engineer level, trying to get the job done, this becomes frustrating. Three different managers are giving direction, often conflicting, and usually wrong. When technical questions come up, there are no answers to be had from management. And when progress is to be measured, the only question that’s asked is “have we spent as many hours as we said we would?”

This atmosphere leads to an interesting culture. There ends up being much animosity between the worker-bee engineers, and management. The divide between the two grows. This becomes very evident in the information flow between management and the worker-bees. Management doesn’t share information with the worker-bees, because management views information as power. Worker-bees don’t share information with management, because sending information up the chain is sure to result in a barrage of “management assistance,” which again is often conflicting and wrong.

At the end of the day, the work still all gets done. Projects get completed, and the end product is delivered to the customer. However, it’s inefficient, and the whole environment is frustrating as hell to the worker-bee engineers of the world.

 

[Compositepro]

Welcome to the world of bureaucratic capitalism where corporations work for government agencies. Your powers of observation are pretty good and, as you note "the work still gets done". The frustration on your part is understandable but you should also understand that frustration is purely a personal internal emotional reaction. It doesn't help you or anyone else around you. You need to determine if there is any action you can take to make things better, in your view. If you do take some action you will probably become what you call an SDM. Otherwise, do your job the best you can and don't worry about what you cannot control. Organizations of thousands or people are never efficient. If you can't accept being part of that, then you should consider going into the small business world. That has its own set of "frustrations", like more limited resources.

There are happy people in terrible organizations and miserable people in great organizations. It all depends on you and how you relate to your boss and coworkers.

 

[IRstuff]

Either you're confused or your company is confused.

An "Integrated Process Team (IPT) lead" is by definition a MANAGER. That's what "lead" means. They might do actual technical work, but their job is supposed to be managing a diverse group of interdisciplinary engineers.

As for who's giving orders, that is a management problem. If your group cannot see that, there's a problem. If there are conflicting orders, then someone, YOU, should raise that issue and get it resolved.

I'm not sure which "evil empire" you belong to, but every company, nay, every organization is different. A company that is certified CMMI Level 5 can have organizations that are utterly incapable of operating at CMMI Level 1. If you're in a dysfunctional organization, there's not much to do but go elsewhere.

Nonetheless, organization, however badly it's implemented, is still required for forward progress. Organizations that don't have any leadership will repeat mistakes. I've seen an microprocessor designed at one company nad the entire design team decided to bail go to a startup. The new microprocessor had the exact, identical design errors.

That said, inefficiency is a hallmark of large programs; it's inevitable, due to the fact that a human can only manage so much information. Large projects have large amounts of information that has to be spread among a large group of people. Humans are terrible at playing Post Office, and the net result is almost always some level of confusion.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize

 

[Comcokid]

The only difference between your observations on management in the defense industry, and my experiences with management in non-defense companies it that - - - - you use a lot of three-letter acronyms.


Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done. - Peter Drucker

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter Drucker

 

[bridgebuster]

I work for a large company too. We're not a defense contractor in the sense that we build weapons, but a good portion of the revenue is from DOD. Nevertheless, on the civil side of things, we're dysfunctional as well. We have the same structure you describe; same attitudes.

After nearly 20 years as a PM I've been transitioning back to more of a technical leader - I came to this company through acquisition - because being a PM there is sickening.

 

[mechengdude]

"Three different managers giving direction". That can be fixed easy enough. Speak to Management and voice your concern. There should be only ONE person giving direction or orders if you have a military background.

Once you have everyone on the same sheet of music regarding that fact things become easier. If your mangement team disagrees then you have bigger problems that no one here can help you with. Good luck.

 

[SomptingGuy]

Sounds like every government-project I've worked on.

PM organises the never-ending meetings. And the pre-meeting meetings.

Chief engineer talks about targets and uses phrases like "top banana".

Engineers at the coal face do whatever it was they were already doing, except there's a new job number and more meetings.

- Steve

 

[casseopeia]

One of my favorite things to do was to provide management with two budget spreadsheets for an upcoming project. One without all the meetings, just the occasional 'team update', and then the Management Special with a Kick-Off Meeting, Weekly Team Meetings, Upper Management Update Meetings 2-3 times a week, Monthly Accounting Update Meetings, and End-of-Project Analysis Meeting. I always like to include a bar chart comparing the two as well (so easy to do in Excel).

But don't listen to me. Managers NEVER like to be shown up as incompetent, budget-wasting fools.

"Gorgeous hair is the best revenge." Ivana Trump

 

[oldfieldguy]

There are several divergent forces at work:

1) "Those who can, do. Those who can't, manage"

2) "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence" (the Peter Principle)

3) "leadership is nature's way of removing morons from the productive flow" (the Dilbert Principle)

old field guy

 

[GregLocock]

Odd. Something we tried once was called Situational leadership. So in a given project team the notional (and it was pretty much notional) leadership role varied depending on when you were in the project, and the requirements of the project. That certainly doesn't happen any more, instead people get absorbed into and booted off the team as the product develops.

If there is a vacuum where nobody is giving technical leadership for a small team I'm not surprised someone steps into the gap, that is both a rational and useful act.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

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[bigTomHanks]

From my experience organizations get top heavy with management because of poor leadership and communication. Something goes wrong due to poor communication and the solution is to create a management position to get things fixed. Over time higher managers see that certain things have a dedicated manager and this becomes the norm for every project or section even though it may not be needed if the particular group already has good leadership. Then you end up with "managers" who have no real job to do because their boss already has it taken care of. These are the ones who are walking around bothering you all the time over things that don't matter just so they have something to be "in charge of." I feel for those people because it is frustrating to want to take on the challenge of being in a leadership position to only be an empty title. Unfortunately this is very common.

 

[graybeach]

I like to compare engineering projects to a symphony orchestra. A symphony orchestra has a management that handles payroll, facility issues, ticketing, etc. It also has the individual musicians who are all experts in playing their particular instruments.

What is needed for all of this to work effectively is someone to direct the musicians, i.e. the conductor. The conductor is someone who is a musical expert in his or her own right. He or she does not play an instrument during a performance, but might play a few bars here and there during rehearsals just to explain his or her vision to the team. The important thing is vision. The conductor has the vision and gets all of the musicians on board with it. Without the conductor the musicians' product is just going to be a bunch of noise.

A good conductor thinks ahead and actually designs a process for completing the project within all of the constraints. What you call the Integrated Process Team (IPT) lead should be performing this function.

Often in engineering offices, the importance of the conductor is minimized. The project managers can't be bothered with such minutia, and the individual engineers focus on their tasks without understanding the vision for the completed project. When the project end approaches, the various parts don't quite fit together and much anguish and gnashing of teeth is needed to assemble a less than well coordinated deliverable. Meanwhile, the budget suffers from the additional work needed to force things to fit together. A good conductor would have been adjusting and tailoring each part of the project so everything comes together at the end. The project vision would have been worked out and would have included everything from what sort of computer models would be used to how would the report pages or drawings be numbered.

What individual engineers who care about this can do is always to establish a vision for your particular task. Next, initiate discussions up the ladder as to how your task fits into the overall vision. Keep doing this until you get to be the conductor. Then you can work on projects that turn out right.

 

[MacGyverS2000]

Something goes wrong due to poor communication and the solution is to create a management position to get things fixed.

Or to add more buffer so when layoffs come, the man at the top can point to someone below them as being incompetent.

Dan - Owner

http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

 

[SNORGY]

The reason there are so many managers is because there aren't enough people with a high enough IQ to be anything else, like an engineer, for example.

Regards,

SNORGY.

 

[ScottyUK]

graybeach,

Nice analogy, although I think you're pitching the conductor's role too far down the heirarchy. Closer to the project manager, or at least closer to what the project manager should be. Carrying the theatre analogy on a bit further: admin, payroll, finance etc would all be roadies and back-stage crew, although in many engineering companies it seems like the engineers become the roadies while admin, finance, etc end up on the stage.

Meanwhile HR assume the role of the janitor clearing the blocked toilet...


----------------------------------

If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!

 

[SNORGY]

I thought the MBAs were supposed to do that...

Regards,

SNORGY.

 

[btrueblood]

Ahh...so it's Maintenance of Bathrooms Assistant?

 

[graybeach]

ScottyUK - you sort of illustrate how the importance of the conductor is minimized in engineering offices.

In my experience, Project Managers do not figure out, say, how a bridge will be modeled for seismic analysis and how the results will be interpreted. In this case (real life example), you could have an individual engineer decide to model the entire bridge out of thousands plate elements when a couple of dozen line elements would be more accurate, allow for easier to interpretation of results, and take a lot less time to do.

Meanwhile, while all that computer modeling was burning up the budget and schedule, no one figured out to arrange the drawing package in a sensible manner, and the set of drawings became a poorly coordinated mess. Plus no one thought about how big the bearings would need to be at the beginning of the project, and the abutment seats ended up being too short which caused an enormous amount of rework at the end of the project.

There are hundreds of other little and big things that a good conductor will do to maximize the chances of success.

LOL on the HR being the janitors. Totally agree with that, but I see roadies and back stage crew as being analogous to survey crews, field inspectors, CAD technicians, etc.

 

[ornerynorsk]

An old boss of mine who I swore was the reincarnation of Hitler said to me once, "the cream rises to the top". To which I responded, "so does the slag, and that's usually thrown out as worthless". I left shortly after.

Dysfunctionality, indifference, and incompetence thrive in all companies, just to varying degrees.

Effect change where you can and accept the rest. Serious matters do need to be addressed, and if they are taken lightly by the higher-ups, it's time to shake the dust from your feet as you leave the city, as the Good Book so eloquently states.

My 2 cents.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

 

[SNORGY]

They don't give stars in the Pub...so...there you go.

Regards,

SNORGY.