Project Management 101 -Need of frontline managers.
Project Management 101 – Project Management 101 – Figuring out what works and whats PMP
After many years of coming across that universal crib in the IT industry that ‘my manager is technically disconnected from my project’ OR ‘doesn’t add value to the project’ , i began to think about the need for front line managers. Most organizations that i have come across are very ‘bottom heavy’. I wouldn’t attribute this to any fundamental flaw in global organizational mechanics. I attribute this to the fact that people are always unduly focused on ‘growing up the org ladder’. So the default response to this was to elongate this ladder. Hence was born organization that were pregnant at the bottom with front line managers.
Some of the cons of this are outlined below:
- People grow into managerial roles very fast. Rather than maturing into it. So their managerial skills are non-existant and their technical skills are rudimentary.
- The role of such managers are ‘supervisory’ rather than ‘visionary’.
- As far as mature teams of senior players are concerned, this creates unnecessary overheads in terms of frequent status reporting, since the managers ‘need something to do’.
- The collective intelligence of the team is often bypassed during planning and problem solving. (disastrous).
- Single points of failures are enforced in the above scenario.
- Front-line managers are often not team players since the gap between them and senior team members is non-existent.
In a typical case this is the active skill set profile of such organizations -
Skill_set_graph
Below are some of the tips I think would help us get out of this.
- Managerial roles should be treated as orgnaizational liabilities. Since people are always weary in investing into organizational liabilities, prudence would be excercised.
- Managerial roles should not be created where the scope is only ‘supervisory’. An evident ‘visionary’ scope should exist to justify their existence.
- A manager who will have less than 10-15 reports is a de-facto liability.
- The basic requirement should be that the person can act as a mentor and not as a monitor.
- Planning for flat organizations would ensure that responsibility, involvement, accountability are driven right down to the very bottom. Such an eco-system is highly necessary for developing management skills.
- Having flat organizations would create technically competent people at all rungs of the ladder.
Tags: collective intelligence, front line, Managers, organization, skills set, supervisory, visionary
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