After several years of development, with the growth of age and the accumulation of experience, transitioning to project management is a path that many people will choose. Even further, with the improvement of technology and management experience, it may take some positions such as director and department manager in a company.
The point of this transformation is that the skills required by coders are different from those required by project managers. It is necessary to deliberately learn project management skills when working as a coder, including working with various people (other programmers, customers, sales , leadership) communication skills, tailoring skills, design skills are required. If you must pay attention to the accumulation of skills required for transformation bit by bit at work. If you are content with your standard and only care about your own part every day, then games and play, then it will be difficult for you to transform. Because opportunity favors only those who are prepared.
So what should be done? How to prepare for this transition?
The premise is that you have to do your own job well (such as writing code). If you can't do your own job well, there is little chance of you wanting to be promoted. The reason is not mentioned. Since any job requires this guarantee, we only summarize the remaining factors.
First: observe and analyze others, learn from others
Observing the project manager is to learn how he manages and communicates with others; what he has done very well and received good results, and what he has not done well enough, how can he improve. Learn how he responds to various requirements of superiors and subordinates and to customers; what tools to use, how to make trade-offs when time is tight, how to resolve conflicts between people in the team, etc.
Observing the programmer is to experience, how to treat him with management methods, to get good results, how to unite such a person to work together and exert his ability. A special point is to observe yourself, which is easy to say but not much done consciously.
Observing customers is to find a way and method to deal with customers, how to reach agreement with customers on project schedule, requirements and even work process requirements.
Second: Participate in project management
The project managers I have seen, no matter how strong their personal abilities are, hope that someone in the team can help them to share the pressure of the project, coordinate the resources of the project together, and undertake the design and implementation of the core part of the project. From what I have seen, if a project manager resigns due to a problem, and the recommender takes over his job, or he is responsible for some things to the leader and recommender, he will usually find someone who shares and assists his project management.
What would a project manager think if he asked someone on the project team to help with management? Do you politely decline because other jobs are already full? That's a really missed opportunity to exercise.
Most project managers, even if they hope to be assisted, do not take the initiative to find members to help. At this time, programmers need to actively seek such opportunities. This is the best way for programmers who are going to transform into project managers in the future. Practical drills. Actively discover things that assist leadership management and do it well.
3: Passionate about helping others
Management is nothing more than people and things, and its core is people. Enthusiastic to help others, let yourself gradually become the person everyone likes, the person everyone depends on, the significance and value of doing project management or other management in the future is immeasurable. One of the functions of a leader is to bring people together to do things together.
There must be a sense that everyone's difficulties are also the difficulties of the project owner, help others solve difficulties, help others find program problems, and write low-level code and public code for the entire project. Even, a lot of chores, people are unwilling to do, you have to do it.
Fourth: Cultivate a variety of interests
People with a wide range of interests are the easiest to communicate with a variety of people. If you don't like anything, you'll be bored all day long, so don't think about anything. This is open to wide, such as reading, such as playing chess, such as music, travel and so on.
Fifth: Even if you want to turn into a project manager, you must have a deep understanding of development technology
This in-depth understanding of development technology is to enable oneself to evaluate the workload of the project and to make appropriate judgments on the resources required by the project; the second is to establish prestige among the developers of the project, and the word counts (although the lay leader core It is common, but it is a good way to learn more about some technologies and then lead and manage technical personnel). Third, it is easy to communicate with technical personnel because there are more common languages.
Summarize
It's easy to be a mediocre project manager, but it's really not easy to transform into an excellent project management role. Although there are countless people who have transformed from developers to project managers, many of them cross the river by feeling the stones and stumble. The purpose of this small article is to summarize the pros and cons of predecessors. As a suggestion for programmers who want to transform into project managers and management responsibilities, I hope to be able to prepare more and better for future transformation.