{"href":"http://player.captivate.fm/services/oembed?url=http%3A%2F%2Fplayer.captivate.fm%2Fepisode%2Ff7259c06-56fc-4238-a6c5-047885687291","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Captivate.FM","provider_url":"https://www.captivate.fm","width":600,"height":200,"type":"rich","html":"","title":"Everyday Series | Season 1 | Thriving Project Management Thursdays | 002 | These Developers","description":"In this episode, we talk about interacting and dealing with developers.\n\nAs Joy Gums said,\" operations keep the lights on, strategy provides light at the end of the tunnel, but it is project management that is the train engine that drives the organization forward.\" And in this time of immense complexity, accelerated change, and intensive competition, great project management skills are needed. Everybody wants to be a project manager, but not everybody wants to do the hard work and project managers are misunderstood.\n\n\n\nBut more misunderstood than project managers, are these people that I can't stand that drive me crazy. That just makes me want to punch the wall and throw them out of the building. And the topic for today's episode is these mother trucking developers, these mothers trucking developers. I work in the project management world.\n\n\n\nMy expertise in project management is in software development and IT and digital projects. And when I started, I had to, and it was inevitable that I would start working with these creatures that I don't understand. And I didn't understand that moment in time, and they're called developers, they'll drive you crazy with their technical speak, their technical jargon.\n\n\n\nTheir weird personalities, their glasses, their contact lenses. Them playing fortnight every now and then, and just them nerding out and geeking out and them not understanding the importance of timelines and not complicating the application that you reading. And sometimes they thinking that they're God's gift to earth sometimes.\n\n\n\nDo you know what I mean? And like I learned that developers have only two states. One, they don't know what they're doing. And then two, they're a God and they know everything that they're doing, and I'm saying these things that tongue in cheek, I've learned to have a bit of affection with them.\n\n\n\nAnd I learned that developers are misunderstood. And if you're going to be a software project manager you need to be able to understand developers. And I've worked with them for seven-plus years now. So I can say I started to learn to understand them and, I've been on projects where salespeople.\n\n\n\nAnd the project sponsors and the clients would abuse, the developers would have them working 15, 16 hour days and blaming everything on the developer, not protecting them and expecting them to go above and beyond and expecting them to do work that is outside of what was contractually obligated to do because you feel that you want to take advantage and have more cool features that may or may not make sense.\n\n\n\nAnd it's really unfair. There was one developer I love this guy I'm not gonna mention his name, but I love it. I love the guy who I worked with them four years ago and he was he's based in Cape Town. He had a very bad rap because it was great at what he did, but then the expectations were just wrong and it was misunderstood.\n\n\n\nNoone, I took the time to understand him. And you as a project manager who has been misunderstood, it's good to take time to understand them. The first thing that you need to understand about developers is they are people. They are people. They exist, they have lives. They're not mythical creatures. They are not robots.\n\n\n\nThey've got interests. That developer has, is, was, is someone's son that's someone's daughter. They've got interests. They may be quirky interests. They may be interested in certain series and games, but they are people, they've got needs, they've got wants, they've got desires. They've got aspiration, they've got dreams and they've got their own preferences.\n\n\n\nAnd if it to best understand them is try to understand another person. As Stephen Covey said, seek first to understand then to be understood. So do your best so that you can understand the developers that you're working with. They are generally introverted people. A majority of the developers i've worked with. They're generally introverted people. That's what makes them so great at their jobs. The...","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300,"thumbnail_url":"https://artwork.captivate.fm/01cb0031-dd70-4594-94a9-75fe7c508d27/FG9iwmKAM9wgy9XlNmoda0ig.jpg"}