Reflections on large-scale project management

11 years ago this week I moved to France, marking a radical change in my employment status. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it also marked the start of a change in my primary career: I became a project manager. How's that gone?

Up to that point, I was primarily "entrepreneur" (the word is overwrought, but in this case accurate.) Rob and I built a company, focused on a software product, chased customers and financing, hired employees, and the like. Over time, regardless of title, my job was primarily software project manager and company mouthpiece. Come up with an idea and publicize it.

In Europe I did the same kinds of things, more for Plone than for Zope. But starting with a large NGO project, my how-I-get-paid job changed. I managed a large web project, based on open source software, with primary development done by an extremely dispersed team of open source developers.

Like many changes that look obvious in retrospect, this had no plan. It just happened, with the lessons emerging after the fact. I found that I enjoyed the work tremendously and that I had a few traits that were really well-suited for this:

  • Throat choking. My experience as a Navy officer taught me about taking responsibility. Over time I grew to tell my customers: "Mine is the throat you shall choke." Meaning, for the part of the equation that was ours, I tried to own the end-to-end responsibility.
  • Open source consultants. When properly tapped, the open source developers are a boon to the customer. They get insanely-talented developers, who are the primary authors of the framework being used, working at reasonable rates, and they can fire them at any time. Devil is in the "properly tapped". Being from the open source world, getting value out of a distributed set of developers was a natural skill, although it took some refinement over the years.
  • Two feet. As a former CEO of a 50 person company that did 3 rounds of VC financing, I have an appreciation for the business side. High level (strategy, corporate identity, business plans) but also for projects and getting to value quickly. For the other foot, though I'm not remotely as skilled a developer as my compatriots, I am capable of writing shippable code. This allowed me to sit in a room with the stakeholders and speak with some finality on time/cost/risk.

That said, "mistakes were made". I have had the privilege to project-manage 5 over $500k web projects. One that, over the years, has been far higher than that. With great power comes great screwups. Over the years, you end up in a spot of refinement.

I think about some of the work that Tres, Chris, and I have done along with our best partners. Chris Rossi, Balazs Ree, Carlos de la Guardia, Blaise Laflamme, Shane Hathaway…a lot of rock stars from the Python and Plone worlds, who have proven themselves as highly professional consultants as well as skilled developers. We have found a way of operating that is deeply effective on larger projects.

Launching the new website and preparing for the PyCon Brasil keynote has been a moment of reflection, along with the anniversaries both of leaving for and returning from Europe. It's been a heck of a run.

posted: 2013-08-07 15:56   by Paul Everitt | permalink