Project Management: People

One of my favorite blogs is Rands In Repose. Rands is the only person I've ever read that makes project management sound both fun and challenging. He really seems to be able to get into the heads of people and understand what makes them tick. While reading his book Being Geek, I thought to myself that I would really enjoy the challenge of being a full-time project manager in the future (there's always time to write code in my off hours...just ask my wife ). But I don't think I'm at that point yet as I'm not ready to give up writing code during my day job.

One area of project management that Rands focuses on is managing people. At Art & Logic, I have the luxury of focusing most of my energies on the project. I'm not responsible for managing anyone's career path or filling out yearly evaluations. It's basically a matter of defining and doling out tasks. I do my best to try and match developers with tasks in which they have genuine interest, but that isn't too difficult given the unique types of projects we get.

One interesting aspect of project management at Art & Logic is that I'm always managing new people. Part of me enjoys the opportunity to work with new people. At the same time, it would be nice to gel with a consistent team of people and developer deeper relationships. But it really seems to be the nature of consulting where projects come and go much quicker and it's necessary to match the project with people having the appropriate skills.

But again, I'm thinking that it might be fun in the future to work for a product company and manage a team of developers on a commercial product. It would definitely be a new challenge to be responsible for a single product and a single team. I also think it would be fun to be more of a mentor and help people along their paths to become better developers.