Today I noticed that a project manager who sits near me never got up from his seat, never had any meetings, never discussed anything with the developers or the business analysts.
Even though he appeared to be working -- didn't notice any web surfing on the occasions when I walked by, seemed to be doing some spreadsheets and paperwork -- I would say he flunked the minimum requirements for his job. Almost all jobs require personal interaction, except maybe the most basic programmer on a really heavy coding day. Senior coders, managers, and certainly project managers should spend their time mostly on personal interaction on most days.
What I think this project manager did today was spend the day using tools to communicate. Chat, email, documents. All good stuff, but they're the supplement, the seasoning, not the meat.
We sometimes fall in love with the tools. They make our lives so easy.
Major, major mistake.
Jonah Lehrer talks about how doctors who use MRIs to diagnose back pain do a much worse job than doctors who don't. They start seeing things in their scans and draw conclusions that their training and common sense would contradict.
On a project that a colleague was on, he would get informed of his assignments through the issue tracking system, which was Jira. When he transferred to the project, he actually got an assignment from Jira before his project manager ever contacted him. I never found out who his manager was, because he would always reply "Jira" when I asked him.
Collaboration tools make a big difference and in fact are essential to a well-run project, but you can end up with too much use of them. They keep the cranks turning, but they don't ultimately deliver anything.
On the other hand, you can never have enough personal attention -- your personal touch, your time and involvement face-to-face or at least on the phone. Fostering team identity, motivation, confidence, priority / urgency, appreciation. These and many other things can only be done personally.
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