Everyday Series | Season 1 | Thriving Project Management Thursdays | 002 | These Developers
In this episode, we talk about interacting and dealing with developers.
As Joy Gums said," operations keep the lights on, strategy provides light at the end of the tunnel, but it is project management that is the train engine that drives the organization forward." And in this time of immense complexity, accelerated change, and intensive competition, great project management skills are needed. Everybody wants to be a project manager, but not everybody wants to do the hard work and project managers are misunderstood.
But more misunderstood than project managers, are these people that I can't stand that drive me crazy. That just makes me want to punch the wall and throw them out of the building. And the topic for today's episode is these mother trucking developers, these mothers trucking developers. I work in the project management world.
My expertise in project management is in software development and IT and digital projects. And when I started, I had to, and it was inevitable that I would start working with these creatures that I don't understand. And I didn't understand that moment in time, and they're called developers, they'll drive you crazy with their technical speak, their technical jargon.
Their weird personalities, their glasses, their contact lenses. Them playing fortnight every now and then, and just them nerding out and geeking out and them not understanding the importance of timelines and not complicating the application that you reading. And sometimes they thinking that they're God's gift to earth sometimes.
Do you know what I mean? And like I learned that developers have only two states. One, they don't know what they're doing. And then two, they're a God and they know everything that they're doing, and I'm saying these things that tongue in cheek, I've learned to have a bit of affection with them.
And I learned that developers are misunderstood. And if you're going to be a software project manager you need to be able to understand developers. And I've worked with them for seven-plus years now. So I can say I started to learn to understand them and, I've been on projects where salespeople.
And the project sponsors and the clients would abuse, the developers would have them working 15, 16 hour days and blaming everything on the developer, not protecting them and expecting them to go above and beyond and expecting them to do work that is outside of what was contractually obligated to do because you feel that you want to take advantage and have more cool features that may or may not make sense.
And it's really unfair. There was one developer I love this guy I'm not gonna mention his name, but I love it. I love the guy who I worked with them four years ago and he was he's based in Cape Town. He had a very bad rap because it was great at what he did, but then the expectations were just wrong and it was misunderstood.
Noone, I took the time to understand him. And you as a project manager who has been misunderstood, it's good to take time to understand them. The first thing that you need to understand about developers is they are people. They are people. They exist, they have lives. They're not mythical creatures. They are not robots.
They've got interests. That developer has, is, was, is someone's son that's someone's daughter. They've got interests. They may be quirky interests. They may be interested in certain series and games, but they are people, they've got needs, they've got wants, they've got desires. They've got aspiration, they've got dreams and they've got their own preferences.
And if it to best understand them is try to understand another person. As Stephen Covey said, seek first to understand then to be understood. So do your best so that you can understand the developers that you're working with. They are generally introverted people. A majority of the developers i've worked with. They're generally introverted people. That's what makes them so great at their jobs. The best developers generally are introverted. They don't like to go to meetings. They don't like to go it's unnecessary meetings. They don't want to necessarily talk. They want to code. They want the code to compile.
They want to refactor. They want to clean up the code. They want to do cool stuff, that's inspiring to them. Please as a PM, and as a client representative, don't set up meetings after meetings, after meetings because their primary focus, in my experience, is they want to code. They want to do cool stuff.
They want to do their job. They don't want to be stuck in meetings when that time could have been used productively In terms of coding and fixing things. Now, there are times you may need to set up the meetings for the work with them so that they can get, provide your expert advice and input.
Generally speaking, don't put them in meetings and now project managers have this thing of, we were focused on timelines and the schedule we'll go to a developer and say, how long is this going to take? And then they'll give you an estimate. And then five minutes later, you're saying, are you done yet? How long is this going to take?
No, I had a great friend of mine developer, Deo Mujinga, I did a podcast episode, number three for the conversation, the main podcast. He was the third guy that I did the interview with. I'll leave a link in the show notes. He said when a project manager or a client comes to me and asked me for a timeline and I give them that timeline, you can go, now you can go leave me alone, which means it takes the time that it's going to take.
So don't keep pestering people. Once the developers have given you a timeline, and it can be difficult because we. To panic all the time, but we need to make sure the estimates are correct because sometimes developers may not consider all the different elements when it comes to estimates.
You may want to say, have you considered testing? Have you considered the break that it will take you if anything goes wrong? Just coach them and talk them through the estimates that they give you. And once they've given you the estimates, please have a level of trust with them and be sure to have that open and honest communication channels with them.
But at the end of the day, they love their work and they work hard. I have never met a developer who was a really good one. I'm talking about the good ones now. Who was not very passionate about the work. They will keep. on reading and Googling and looking at the latest technologies, the best ways to do things, how best to do their code.
And some of the best developers will even learn project management skills so that they can project manage themselves. And the developers that they're leading, which will make your life a whole lot easier, but the best developers, they love the work and they work hard. I once looked at a developer. I'm like, you're working so hard. Why do you love, why do you do this and he says, man, I love coding, man. I love coding. Why are you a project manager? And I said to him, man, I love project management. Man, I love project management. they love the work that they're doing. And for you as a PM, you need to be their best friend. Okay. You need to be their best friend because, without them, the work is not getting done. Okay. The work's not going to get done. And if you have the open, honest trust with them, if you mess up, tell them, listen, I messed up, I got the estimation wrong, or I didn't communicate this piece of information or it was what I said was erroneous. Be open and honest to say when you were wrong, so you can build that trust relationship with them.
And as a PM, your job is to protect the developers from client interactions, because clients will try and bring in scope creep and features that they think they are cool. They might end up bullying, the developers because of their own interests. You are there to protect them. You are their father, you are their mother in that specific context. All right. If you want to know how to, it feels like to be a parent, be a project manager in IT, I'm telling you, you're definitely going to feel that and you need to be their best friend that you need to be able to protect them from scope creep, protect them from outside interests, protect them from burning out, protect them from themselves, sometimes you just save them from themselves. Protect them from themselves at that moment in time, make sure that you say I am on your side. I want you to be the best that you can be. Help me help you. All right. With that being said, you still need to hold them accountable. Hold them accountable to quantity standards, hold them accountable to what they promised, hold them accountable to work practices that are going to be the best for everyone.
Try your best to communicate to them, to understand that if you're late with whatever it is that you are building, you are going to impact the client. You're going to impact the BA the UX designer, the whoever's else is involved from a stakeholder perspective. Let them know. That their actions or inactions have consequences and be sure to hold them accountable and have a trust relationship with them, but also build that accountability and make sure that the consequences are clear and that they know.
And you followed through with the consequences there, but developers, you still need to hold them accountable. Let's just recap what I said They are misunderstood. So take the time to understand them. Not all of them are all of the same, not all of them are exceptionally nerdy. Some of them can be cool.
Some of them are not, but they're still people at the end of the day, they are genuinely introverted. They are introverted people. They love their work and they work hard and you need to be their best friend and protect them, but you still need to hold them accountable. And once you understand all of these things, you're not going to want to rip your hair out.
You're not going to punch them in the face, throw them out of a window, just throw them off the top floor because you don't understand them. They are great people. They work hard. They make sure everything is running and they are really dedicated to the work that they do. So you need to take the time to respect your developer.
And I'm just going to emphasize some funny sayings. I found Any fool can write code that a computer can understand good programmers write code that humans can understand. Please developers. If you're out there, please write code that humans can understand then first solve the problem then write the code.
Don't go out there and just code for the sake of coding, solve the problem and write the code. Now you're going to mess up developers out there but experiences the name that you give to your mistakes. So don't think of it as a mistake, but think of it as how you're building your experience, um, and I told you that there are two states that they exist in I'm a God, or I don't know what I'm doing, and that's my breakdown on these developers.
They drive you crazy. But they're still great people and you need to be able to assist them. And also they generally don't like testers because they butcher their work and they break their children. So if you have testers in your team, be sure that you can manage that relationship the best way that you can.
And because they can be a bit invested and egotistical, but the tester will break you. For example, here's this conversation that I have between a developer and a tester. The developer said I am not able to replicate this issue. This is working fine on my machine. So close to the bug. Then the tester says, I don't care if it's as working fine on your machine, we are not going to deliver your machine to the client.
How many times, have you heard that the program works on my local. No, we're not shipping your local machine was here to make sure that it works well in all the different environments. Make sure it works in UAT and pre-production and production. You need to be able to go and test that, So that's the thing.
And I hope that you enjoyed this episode of thriving project management, Thursdays, and where we talked about these developers, where you need to understand developers, they are misunderstood, people. They are still people that are introverted. They love it, the work, and they work hard. You to be their best friend to protect them.
However, you still need to hold them accountable. If you liked this episode, please like share comments, subscribe. Let me know what you think. If you're interested in any books and merchandise, please head over to the websites. And remember as Joy Gums said, "operations keep the lights on strategy provides light at the end of the tunnel, but it is project management that is a train engine that drives the organization forward." Have a great Thursday choose to understand these developers so you can thrive as a project manager in the IT space. And I will see you in the next episode.
