Fire Fighter or Project Manager?
Projects come in different shapes and sizes. Within the sell-side of finance there are two streams of projects; those run by IT following fairly standard IT practices, project plans, estimates, and an waterfall/agile process. The alternative are business lead projects which usually ignore anything IT related – I’ve often seen desk build their own IT departments and ignore existing corp. IT departments completely. These business lead projects are often run by a desk, where 4 weeks is a “long” project and estimates exist in hours. The business projects are always aggressive, mainly because they are essentially to the underlying bonus culture of the desk. Desk projects follow a rule of attempting to break ever IT rule in the corporation (sometimes for good reason). One characteristic of business vs IT projects are the style in which they are run. IT projects normally use standard project management techniques (possibly because the PM is an ex-developer), whereas the desk run projects are more like fire fighting projects (possibly because the PM has no knowledge of IT). Both styles offer an interesting insight into the politics of the sell-side that is driven by a bonus culture.
Ahh… the complexities of deciding what’s good for the immediate term and what’s good for the long run. IT seems always to provide a good long term solution for the long term benefit of the solution and the company where as an ad-hoc, “let’s get it working” approach of a desk, or any instant fix in the finance or real time world is also of the same (seemingly) importance. Being in a world where both are valid, is there not some balance of firefighting leading on to project managing a long term solution even for the same project? A balancing act? Yes, of course… Perhaps it’s just experience in all areas of the field, from a developer, IT Project manager, end customer where you can see all the issues, and respond accordingly for now, and for the future….. Either way – difficult to manage and something that I guess a lot of us experience every day!