Picking on Managers ... again

It's been said that I've been picking on programmers too much recently, so I thought I would skip the low hanging fruit and go after something higher up on the tree.  Let's start with one of my favourite slogans:

Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.

A project manager has a specific role on a project team:  planning and coordinating the activities of the team members.  On larger projects this may actually be the delegation of this responsibility to other members of the team.  On a large 75+ person project I worked on there was one Project Manager who ran the entire project, but four other managers who actually did the planning.  Please note that this 75+ person project had a total of 5 managers.  There were a number of team leads on the project as well bringing down the ratio to 1 to 5 for supervisors to staff.  This is by many standards a fairly low ratio, but it was typical in the organization I was with, with many of the supervisors spending only a portion of their time supervising and the rest of the time working on different tasks that needed to be done.

Each team lead knew what was expected of their team in the short term and what the long term objectives were.  Every week there were meetings amongst team leads and their respective manager and every week the managers got together to discuss the status of the project.

This same type of organization is applicable in smaller projects.  Planning is one of the key factors:  know what needs to be done now and in the future.  Too often have I seen and read about projects that do not have a clear understanding of what is required and the usual impact of this is larger, more complex projects than is required and the resulting cost and timetable impacts this has.

Worst of all, from my perspective right now, this has a tremendous impact on the Deployment Team.  Too often have we had requests like "...but the user needs it now, do we have to give you five minutes advance notice? ..." or "... it's just a small change, but we need to recompile everything and send you a complete package, if we get it done by midnight can you have it in place by 12:01? ...".  T

he reason we ask for advance notice on migrations is so that we have the opportunity to plan our own work.  If you don't give us advance notice we can't plan and that annoys me.  And everyone knows what happens when I get annoyed.