The Code Whisperer

I’ve watched bits of each of the UK series of The Apprentice, I know it’s a TV show yet I still get quite irritated by the twisting back-stabbing nature of some of the people on it. It’s a game show not a job interview, but I can’t quite fully accept it. I wonder when people in the boardroom are complaining about the project manager whether they consider the points they make when they are leading.

Watching some of the tasks I can only feel sorry for the project managers:

• Team members wanting to take control to undermine the PM and get him or her fired
• Team members not working at 100%, but still looking busy so the team fails and the PM gets fired
• Incorrect decisions not rectified
• PM trying to do a key role and not just manage

The first two problems can be found in any team and frankly leadership skills are the only way to resolve it. However it amazes me that some of the contestants just don’t understand how important it is as a team member to take direction from the manager. It’s important to voice your opinions or experience, but if direction is taken then follow it.

We learn more from failure than from success, but this is not the way society is geared. I’m not condoning malicious errors or incompetence, but as I’ve said before in this blog, genuine mistakes do help form a team or product. Sticking to a decision for fear of admitting a mistake is simply foolish, but we see it every day in business, politics and education.

This last point is slightly complex and becomes harder as the weeks go by and the team decreases in size.

In last night’s episode, project manager Simon Smith was fired having lost money at a photography shoot in the Bluewater shopping centre. Clearly Simon had a flare for photography as echoed by professional photographer Terry O’Neill in the follow up programme. If he was the best person to take photographs, I really don’t think he should have been project manager, simply because there were enough team members to have a dedicated project manager, who would have seen the problems with printing and had it sorted much quicker.

A strong message from small business marketing experts such as Paul Gorman is that you should work on your business not in your business. What that means is working to market, expand and promote your product or service, and not spend time bookkeeping or ordering paper clips. This isn’t always possible and the smaller the company the harder it becomes. The same applies to development teams. In a large company, those that manage should only manage and not write code, test applications, etc. As the size of the company decreases so does the ability to pull managers away from the “coal face”. But look at it this way. Should a manager on, say £45 an hour, be carrying out tasks that an office admin position pays £10 an hour? No!