Let’s face it: one person project is fine, two is ok, three or more is a mess. Say you are a project manager; you have two ways to do you job:
- You can get strongly involved in project’s everyday tasks: requirements, architecture, implementation details… you know the project and answers come easily when hard questions arise. Extra points if you code some parts of the system.
- You can use the outsider’s approach and do objective project management: take tasks, take resources, mix’em up and then monitor the whole thing day after day. Extra points if you don’t even know what the project is about or what the programmers do to get that damn thing working.
Either approach is great in my view, but your will to live can really get sucked out in either of them, too. If you get deeply involved, you get no time to do any project management: time flies when you engage into a hard technical challenge.
If you take it impersonally, make sure your life outside work is just great, otherwise it’ll take you less than four weeks to start considering suicide.
I guess it ends up like everything else in life: drawing a line at the right point.