I find it hard to think of any administrative work in the 21st century that is not technical.
Just recently my wife tried to pay her social taxes but the money was transferred to a bank account that did not correspond to her appropriate district. For some reason the correct bank account number was not communicated to her, and for some reason districts have different bank account numbers.
The country in question is still quite backward when it comes to administration. Departments are not integrated. Money that goes to the state to one account number can't be identified by a different district as a state payment. It's a mess.
The reason why it is a mess is because the people doing the administration are non technical. Today, nearly all money transfers are electronic, nearly all form submissions are electronic, and 99% of administrative business processes are or can be automated.
Administration == IT.
Now one might try to present the argument that project management is not about delivering technical change but about orchestrating people.
This is usually not the case. Unless we are talking about control systems or engineering, where senior managers focus on tight quality control and other peripheral aspects of technical change, most white-collar work is about delivering change to business processes. And in this day and age those business processes are largely automated.
To effectively deliver change you have to understand what you are changing, and today that means automated business processes. In other words, IT systems.
I think though that it would be too harsh to draw the conclusion that PMs should all be technical or be fired. The real problem is that all too often there is no economic incentive for ineffective project management to change. Most projects fail, most projects are inconsequential, and in the Western world most projects exist just to keep someone in some bullshit job. Money is largely synthetic and real production is automated.
If devs want technical project management, then we should either demand it, or educate and train those managers we have. If the PMs are our bosses, then we either have to manage the managers or quit. It's as simple as that.
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Loved this article.
I find it hard to think of any administrative work in the 21st century that is not technical.
Just recently my wife tried to pay her social taxes but the money was transferred to a bank account that did not correspond to her appropriate district. For some reason the correct bank account number was not communicated to her, and for some reason districts have different bank account numbers.
The country in question is still quite backward when it comes to administration. Departments are not integrated. Money that goes to the state to one account number can't be identified by a different district as a state payment. It's a mess.
The reason why it is a mess is because the people doing the administration are non technical. Today, nearly all money transfers are electronic, nearly all form submissions are electronic, and 99% of administrative business processes are or can be automated.
Administration == IT.
Now one might try to present the argument that project management is not about delivering technical change but about orchestrating people.
This is usually not the case. Unless we are talking about control systems or engineering, where senior managers focus on tight quality control and other peripheral aspects of technical change, most white-collar work is about delivering change to business processes. And in this day and age those business processes are largely automated.
To effectively deliver change you have to understand what you are changing, and today that means automated business processes. In other words, IT systems.
I think though that it would be too harsh to draw the conclusion that PMs should all be technical or be fired. The real problem is that all too often there is no economic incentive for ineffective project management to change. Most projects fail, most projects are inconsequential, and in the Western world most projects exist just to keep someone in some bullshit job. Money is largely synthetic and real production is automated.
If devs want technical project management, then we should either demand it, or educate and train those managers we have. If the PMs are our bosses, then we either have to manage the managers or quit. It's as simple as that.