Questions tagged [project-management]
Project management is a professional field involving managing the scope, changes, schedule, and completion of a temporary endeavor that has a clear end. This is a professional field with it's own certifications and professional educational programs. If your question relates to the workplace, ask it here; otherwise, if the question is solely about project management, consider asking it on our sister site Project Management Stack Exchange instead.
473
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Overprovisioned teams in services companies
Is it common for managers to pack more engineers into a team than there are tickets to solve in the pipeline in order to generate contests and pit engineers against eachother and get better delivery ...
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1
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Requesting signed feedback form from end-client
I'm working in the following setup: Me -> A -> B. Where A is a services company and B is the end-client (a product company). There are multiple providers for A in the same team, I'm one of them.
...
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4
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Manager implied that I should be pushing a colleague to get work done faster. Do I tell the colleague?
Same manager as my previous post. My colleague and I are working on the same project, and we are at the same level in the org chart (in fact, we are in the same role), but he is newer to the ...
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1
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Popularize high priority initiative with senior folks from other departments
If I wish to popularize a high priority initiative of my department with senior folks from other departments, then what should I do? My manager is not keen on me reaching out and holding meetings with ...
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1
answer
279
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How to get commissions owed if contract was breached by owner [closed]
My firm was contracted to open a used car dealership. Took me 5 months to open the dealership due to previous owner being non-compliant within the City. Owner was impressed, as others had tried to ...
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4
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3
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1k
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How to handle a request of quantitative benefit analysis from top management where only a qualitative statement can be made?
Some months ago, I took over the project management (together with a collegue from engineering, my responsibility is the scope of operations) for a project from a colleague who had left. The project ...
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7
answers
3k
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How can I ask for a quote breakdown - when agency refuses?
I work for a company that outsource some of our work to an agency. This agency specialize in branding & design, but also sub-contract other work out to designers, developers, etc.
I am new in my ...
- 59.8k
37
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8
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Brought on to failing project and might lose job
Original Question
I work as a backend software developer for a tech company. This company has a multi-million dollar project that is at least three years underway. The project is supposed to go live ...
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3
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250
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Discover all possible stakeholders in a pile of (legacy) systems
I have been assigned a team that seems to have been "abandoned" in the following sense: Hadn't had a direct manager for a long time and has been getting more and more responsibilities of ...
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2
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Is there a common name for the document for new project requirements?
I would like to push in our company so any new project goes with a document stating things in the line of:
Economic savings of the new project
Saving in working hours of the new project
This idea of ...
- 20.9k
3
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5
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2k
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How to push back against HR if I feel their proposed means of conflict of interest mitigation is untenable in long run?
From my most recent question, I am a manager with about 10 years of experience, working in a company with a matrix management structure in which team members also have a PM for a secondary manager.
I ...
- 1,391
2
votes
2
answers
375
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How to handle merging separate expert teams while avoiding bus factor?
When there is a situation that 2 small teams merge to form a bigger one, in the start there will be within the team two different sets of domain experts.
This situation has the advantage that specific ...
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4
votes
1
answer
511
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How to learn non-technical skills (business & soft skills)?
2 years ago, I moved from tech lead in a team of 4 devs at a smallish startup to a big financial company with a completely different landscape (like enterprise IT) and different technology. I'm 55 y.o....
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0
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1
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How to maintain accountability on scheduling without micromanaging?
See title. Description below.
I am the project leader for a research effort with a small team (< 10 people), with a multi-year schedule. One of the things I do when communicating with my team, ...
- 116k
5
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5
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2k
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How to preserve professionalism in a difficult environment
I work as software engineer in a pretty young company (5 years old) and I'm making a lot of errors that can ruin my career.
Until some months ago everything was great: the compensation is just ok. We ...
- 169
1
vote
2
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616
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Conveying to manager about bereavement affected work
Over the weekend I was supposed to give an important last piece of work that was on me, but while working I got news of my dad's sister passing away and I couldn't believe it. It impacted daily life ...
- 28.4k
10
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3
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2k
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As the Big Boss does not trust the PM or myself and the project may be in jeopardy, how can we improve the situation?
TL;DR: The Department Director doesn't trust/believe myself or the Program Manager and is actively demeaning (though possibly out of ignorance rather than true malice), and this is putting the project ...
- 35.5k
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6
answers
724
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How should a project manager tell his team that there are too many bugs?
I remembered that our project manager told us that we had too many bugs in our products and he got into problems because of it, and he let us know about our frustration and even went as far as to ...
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4
answers
675
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How should you deal with a project manager who tries to have it his way even when it's against the company best interest?
How should you deal with a project manager who tries to have it his way even when it's against the company best interests? I am not sure if I am crazy, but I had this project manager argue against me ...
- 26.9k
10
votes
5
answers
627
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Dealing with anxiety when taking on large scope projects
I’m a software engineer. I’m self-taught and I’ve been working with moderate success for a while.
I’ve reached a level of seniority in my career where I’m required to take on ‘ownership’ of large, ...
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85
votes
13
answers
34k
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How to respond to, "How long will this take?" when in a new job position
I started a new job two weeks ago using technologies that are new to me. I was upfront from the start about what I did and did not know so there's no surprises.
I do a little of everything and so I ...
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118
votes
16
answers
28k
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How to deal with a boss who has lost touch with modern software development?
I work (as a junior developer) for a medium-sized company which is the sole market leader in our industry. Our software mainly consists of old code which has been hastily ported/copied to a 90s ...
- 2,515
0
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3
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469
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Duplicate project activities in corporate R&D
I
work for a large corporate providing HW/SW that often lacks alignment between sites across the world.
In the past three years I was fortunate enough to be allocated to a corporate project where we ...
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1
vote
2
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810
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How do I manage effectively experienced (senior) specialists?
I was always working with team of juniors developers or software engineers, where I was always the smartest person in the room.
Now I'm the dumber, I'm working with senior developers or subject matter ...
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4
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2
answers
9k
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How to answer "Give me an estimate on how long this will take you?" [duplicate]
How do you answer the question "Give me an estimate on how long this will take you"?
My boss has presented a list of items he would like me to complete, 3 of which I have no idea what he's asking ...
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26
votes
13
answers
9k
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How to handle a client telling you about future plans and asking you to (temporarily) keep them secret from your hierarchy?
(This is in a B2B context, so "client" here means a company's representative.)
I have a very good working relationship with my client, even if we've been working together only for about a ...
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2
answers
390
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I currently have no work assigned for the past week, what to do? [duplicate]
My company recently hired a new Project Manager and he has been pushing the scrum ideology. While this is great, another junior and I have not been assigned any other tickets for the past week. During ...
- 26.9k
10
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1
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3k
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Leading a two people project, I feel like the other person isn't pulling their weight or is actively silently quitting or obstructing it
I was put in charge of a non-trivial project that requires me and another medior/senior engineer, I don't think it matters but we are talking about embedded systems. I was explicitly defined as the ...
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3
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4
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1k
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Handling Protective Overworked Employee
I am a middle manager at a company and we have a developer who works on our site. He does not report to me. He is overworked and upper management doesn't want to hire someone to help him, but at the ...
- 137k
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3
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577
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Is it rude for coworkers to ignore your idea?
You join a team to help them with the project. This is a team that is outside of your main responsibilities. Your boss tells you it's a good project since it's in the early stages and you can ...
- 380k
117
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13
answers
26k
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What would you say to bosses that think programming jobs are interchangeable?
I'm in this software company, and I've only experienced two managers so far, but both view programming jobs as not much different from laying bricks. They always emphasized we should take on each ...
CommunityBot
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4
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How to get motivated to work on tasks that don't help you improve
To me there are two aspects of any task assigned to a developer in a software project. These are not exclusive, so a task can be (for example) 40% aspect 1 and 60% aspect 2:
Tasks requiring you to ...
- 343
3
votes
7
answers
2k
views
Should I tell my IT manager there is a team member looking for a new job?
I am a team leader of a software development team. There are 2 developers on the team. Before my new Leader position, the two developers and I had to report directly to the IT manager.
I knew that one ...
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37
votes
6
answers
18k
views
Should I tell my boss that I am doing a crazy amount of overtime?
I work at a big tech company as an individual contributor. We are approaching an important launch where I'm playing a key role. There is no strict deadline, but I'd like to make sure it's finished ...
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2
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805
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Group of friends project % split problem
Recently me with a group of friends (group of 3) have started a web page, we have decided that the % (future benefits and expenses) of the project will be 42.5%/42.5%/15%, despite the fact that the ...
- 21
2
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2
answers
1k
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How to deal with an inflexible and difficult project lead
Alright, I work as a Data Scientist and here goes my situation. About a month and half ago, I was 'pulled into' an ongoing project led by a Mechanical Engineer also a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in ...
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2
answers
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I was offered a project management job recently but I realized the products they are building do not have market value, how can I handle this?
The product they are building is for the healthcare system with the major target on healthcare workers. They are focused on communication, collaboration and scheduling.
- 3,011
2
votes
2
answers
933
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I feel like I was set up for disaster, multi-year project at first job is doomed. Advice?
Throwaway and some generalized details for obvious reasons. But the gist of it is, I was hired as a developer for a non-tech company as one of its first members in that department(no other tech roles)....
- 2,762
4
votes
3
answers
2k
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Offshore Personnel Feeling Left Out from Onshore Team
I was recently hired as an ERP Developer in a Global BPO Company (let's call it 3Ps).
I have a manager and a team who's based onshore (US) while I work alone offshore (Philippines).
I am their first ...
0
votes
2
answers
834
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Dealing With Secretive Project
I have been assigned to work on a project that will become Program v2.0. I'm not going into what exactly "Program v2.0" is but as the name implies, it's a completely new version and will ...
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7
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10k
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How should my company deal with contractors that ignore our technical guidance?
I'm a senior software engineer that works in a small group (4 other colleagues and one immediate manager to us). For an R&D project, we work with a contractor to develop some software tools and do ...
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57
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15
answers
23k
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How to deal with an underperforming subordinate?
I'm a Software Developer with experience of more than 1.5 years. After being happy with my performance, the CTO of my company made me a team lead of 3 new employees (2 of them graduated recently).
...
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3
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714
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As the project manager, what to do when an engineer decided on 'wrong' decision?
I'm new as a consultant and project manager. In my role as I understood it, I was not responsible (or even has the right) to decide on technical decision, it was engineer's. I only know a little bit, ...
- 1,330
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5
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2k
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The Dreaded project X
There's this project the place I work at, let's call it Project X for short. Everyone who's been on that project ends up leaving the company for one reason or another. I've been on it at one point, ...
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1
vote
2
answers
849
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In a Scrum shop who calls the deployment?
Imagine a Scrum team with a canonical sprint of 2 weeks. The product could be anything - backend, frontend, mobile, PC game etc.
The devs write code and unit test it. So each knows their end of the ...
- 70k
37
votes
13
answers
15k
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How can I highlight how much better I've made our code and deal with a coworker that disagrees?
I joined a company to help add some functionality to their code. The code is legacy and has been terribly maintained. The technology is ~15 years old.
It takes days to track down bugs and problems ...
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4
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2
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395
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What are common practices for syncing Engineering with Design?
At my last job, I led a team that was building an iOS app from scratch.
We (the engineers) worked closely with a Design team. The two teams struggled to sync their work.
Design would produce UI mocks ...
- 116k
5
votes
3
answers
1k
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Brought on as a senior dev /tech lead, project manager sees differently. How do I make this job work?
I was rehired in a senior dev role to lead a small team for a company I use to work for. I worked for them for 6 years as a senior dev, a few years ago.
However, the new project manager doesn't see me ...
- 9,549
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votes
1
answer
127
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Developer Workflow Management [closed]
So I'm currently working alone on my software project and I was thinking about getting some people to work with me.
Now my question is based on security but also accessibility. How can I manage the ...
- 32.8k
8
votes
2
answers
3k
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Contract with specific end date but need to complete project [closed]
I am working as a paid intern on a project and my contract states it ends at the end of the month. It also states it is my job to prepare a project to be published. I am struggling with the topic I am ...
- 33