Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
(OP)
I'd like to hear your opinions about going from engineering into (non-engineering) management. I have an opportunity to pursue a project management position within my company right now. I'm assuming it's more money and would be good experience but I don't know if I'll enjoy it. I'm also not sure if it's better to stay in the same field and become more of an expert at what I do or if it's better to branch out and get experience in another field. Just curious what you guys think.





RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
The managers responsibilties vary from company to company depending on things like size of the company. If you want to be a good manager I think you need to learn how to do a number of things, the most important I think is the ability to delegate. You will mangage the project's budget, manage your project team, deal with clients (if you are a consultant), and a whole host of other issues that affect the success of the project. The more time you spend doing the engineering the less time you are able to focus on the success of the project.
Bottom line, if you really like doing engineering work and design then managment may not be for you. However, I would suggest you try it out. Mangaging people, budgets, clients etc. can be challenging and presents new opportunities for growth.
I continuely see engineers bash managers on these boards and I think part of it is they don't really understand what a manager does. In my experience it is more challenging than engineering. Like anything it can have it's headaches, but for some it's rewarding. Plus if you want to climb the ladder in your company it is likely the only way to do so. If anything it will force you to develop skills that you may not currently have, or show you potential that you never realized before. And if it doesn't work out, just go back to engineering. No shame in that.
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
"beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan's apprentice."
Good luck,
Latexman
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
The money serves as an anesthetic,
because unlike engineering,
the work itself is not that much fun.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
Some folks enjoy it though!
Good luck to you!
Goober Dave
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
That said, my projects were generally on time or early, and on or under budget. Plus I was the guy with the best project folders who got offered up for ISO & Customer Audits and the like.
It seems to me that the project management is a popular path for folks that aren't technically that strong but want big $ any way.
I'm certainly not saying all project managers are like that. I suppose two that even if they are like that it isn't' necessarily bad, they may be weaker technically but perhaps are better at other aspects project managers need.
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
Management by its nature is a people task, even of the "project" flavor. Most engineers I know would make notoriously bad managers because if they had people skills they would have gone into Psychology or Elementary Education or something. Surviving 4-5 years or more of an engineering curriculum pretty much screws up your neurons, too. I suggest you have a good long talk with yourself to determine if you would enjoy dealing on a daily basis with personality quirks, random acts of heroism and cowardice, high character and scant ethics, happy lies and unpleasant truths, immovable deadlines, unreasonable company officers, loyal troops whom you must send to their career deaths, and everything in between.
Someone once told me about his tenure at "Company X". When an en-guh-neer decided he wanted to be a Manager, they sent him away for a series of classes. The classes essentially de-programmed him from being an engineer and turned him into a touchy-feely company management hack drone whose sole purpose to herd a bunch of tempermental cats around, never to touch "hard engineering" again. So it is in a lot of places, but without the company support of re-training.
Some folks take a shine to the crazy dynamic game of dealing with chaos and human nature rather than the hard numbers and acceptable compromise of many flavors of engineering. Something to think about.
TygerDawg
Blue Technik LLC
Virtuoso Robotics Engineering
www.bluetechnik.com
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
Been there, done that.
Been there, been that.
Beautifully said.
Star for TygerDawg.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
Management takes a differnt skill set than does engineering. Some people have both sets of skills, some have one or the other.
The one point that is emphasized is that all engineers have a certain level of intelligence, that's a given in order to reach this point. For management and in many ways for career advancement, the important skills are the people skills.
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=263643
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
It's a different job, entirely. Balancing the priorities fulcrum, particularly the schedule-budget vs. quality one.
Find a mentor.
Don't let 'em see you sweat.
Keywords: Contact, Budget, Ethics, Change Order, Exclusionary Services, Additional Services, Crisis Negotiation, Indemnity, Betterment, Not-to-Exceed, Cost-Plus, Execution, Termination, Estoppels, Caveat, Rider, Lump Sum, Acceptable Write-Offs...and, Vodka
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
Your line about:
"The more time you spend doing the engineering the less time you are able to focus on the success of the project."
has really hit home for me. It's very true, and a large reason why several of my projects go over budget...
tg
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
I think that is the most difficult thing for a lot of engineers who are getting into management, letting go of the engineering duties. You have to trust the engineers that are working for you and understand they will approach problems differently than you do.
I have had many managers / superiors that want to check engineering calcs and get involved in the nuts and bolt engineering duties when it is a complete waste of their time. They should only get involved when someone asks for their guidance.
If the people doing the engineering work are really doing a poor job (and by that I don't mean they aren't doing it "your way") then you need to correct them. It may seem more difficult to correct someone than to just do it yourself. But if you teach people it will help you in the long run as a manger. You have to have faith in people and give them responsiblity.
And if someone isn't doing the job to the level needed for that position, despite your best attempts to help them, then you need to get them off the project. The "dark side of managment".
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
I would recommend you to have a try but you have to be honest enough with yourself to realize if you are loosing a good engineer to get a lousy manager. I've seen this happen in the past and it is a loose-loose situation.
"Morpheus: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember -- all I am offering is the truth, nothing more."
The Matrix
Good luck with your choice.
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
Nonetheless, until you try doing it, you'll never know whether a) you can do it, or b) you'll like. I've had small managerial positions early on, which solidified my desire to never touch them again. As others have said, there are those that thrive on being the coordinator and expediter of successful projects.
The basic task of a manager is to manage, keep out of the way of their engineers, and to make things happen for their engineers. Unfortunately, too few managers ever achieve those goals. However, much of that is due to differences in job expectations, and requirements imposed on managers vs. engineers. In management, as well as engineering, arbitration of competing requirements and conditions is a pre-requisite of achieving any sort of completion. But, the requirements and conditions that a manager must trade and balance are completely different, and often, contrary to those of the engineers. Also, often, survival means making decisions that are completely contrary and detrimental to the rest of the troops.
As an example, I offer this scenario.
A new general manager is promoted from within our division. Our division has been losing gobs of money, along with the rest of the company, for nearly 6 years. We've had 7 GMs in the prior 4 years at the division already, including nearly a 75% RIF. So the new GM's first acts are to cancel all IR&D projects. We engineers are thinking "logic inverter" about the GM.
We have these metal-gate PMOS devices that we pretty much sub out everything, including the printing of our part numbers and logos, and still make something like 80% gross margin; they're our cash cows. Our new GM starts issuing last-buy notices to our customers, basically telling them that we're no longer going to stop production on these cash cows. We're now thinking "criminally insane" about the GM.
So, what's his story?
This GM is actually the smartest one of the lot. He recognizes that his tenure at the division is measured in months, not years, and regardless of what he does, his tenure will not exceed about 6 months (7 GM/4 yr). He can do the "right" thing and work as if the division will survive and sink with the ship, or he can generate a profit and get promoted. Rightly or wrongly, he chooses to survive, so elimination of IR&D helps the bottom line, and he won't be around to deal with the lack of future products. Forcing last-buys gooses the bottom line from ~$20K/month/product to ~$300K for each product killed. By staging the last-buys, he can goose bottomline for several months. Sure enough, at month 6, he manages to be profitable for 2 months, and he's promoted. The next GM comes in, completely unaware of what had previously transpired, and is seen crying a river over the doomed ship that he's now the captain of, but that's another story.
TTFN
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
What you describe as a manager is pretty much what I did for 11 years. Most of the people I had to shield my engineers, architects and construction rep's was other management. I never tried to be touchy-feely as that was the architect's job. We increased our annual workload from a typical $10M to over $110M by eliminating a middle level of management. Any manager approaching my resources was an invitation for offense, and the working peeple appreciated not having to deal with the bloviation. Went from there to an organization that emphasized management over deliverables and every project had to have a Project Intensive Mangement Plan. Of course, the overhead went up about 60%, business went out the door, and all technical staff got tired of being PIMP'd.
Back in engineering, over management objection, lower pay, and not regretting it.
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
How do you know unless you give it a go?
If you don't like it you'll learn a lot and get a lot of it anyway. You can then return to a more technical path. I think it would at least make you a better engineer by learning the overall process, getting an understanding of other disciplines, and get a lot of contacts which always proves useful.
Plus if you decide to own your own business, it will prove invaluable.
Goodluck and let us know your decision.
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
RE: Transitioning to management, what's your experience?
The hardest part that I see in making the switch from technical engineering to project management is not necessarily the people skills, while they are important I have seen many successful project managers with the people skills of a garden slug.
The hardest part IMHO is giving up control. You no longer have the luxury of taking long looks at every technical aspect of the project but have to start delegating this responsibility to the technical engineers working on your project. It is a matter of trusting people and starting to think more of schedule budget than technical quality.
The trap that engineers often fall into is becoming micro managers. Think about how much you liked being micromanaged and then realize that your people do not like it any more.
It will also be a lot more difficult to move from being one of the technical engineers in the pack to managing the people who are today your co-workers.
Managing professionals is actually very easy. Professionals, especially engineers, want to be motivated and productive. They get a good deal of self-satisfaction from doing a good job and will willingly go the extra mile to do so.
The most important factor in managing engineers is keeping them focused on the task at hand. If they want to spend several days making a small refinement in one minor aspect of the design, it is your responsibility to get them working on what you see as a major and more important problem. Beyond that all you have to do is let them know that their contributions are valuable and appreciated and that you have trust in their technical competence.
Once they start trusting your professional judgement then being a project manager becomes very easy and because you are leveraging your skills you can have a significant impact on the project and therefore get a lot more satisfaction out of your work than being a technical engineer concentrating on one small portion of the work.
It does require some different skill sets. I took an MBA to develop the ability to think like a manager and can switch between management and engineering problem solving skills with relative ease. Using engineering problem solving skills is not always the best way to solve managerial problems and the reverse is true as well.
Finally remember the principle of command responsibility. If you are in command then you are responsible. There is no grey area in this one. Everything that goes wrong is your fault and everything that goes right is to the credit of your team. Follow this one rule 100% and magically there will be a lot more things going right than wrong as people will start working together as a team and covering for each other's weaknesses with their strengths instead of passing on something that is not specifically their job.
Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng
Construction Project Management
From conception to completion
www.kitsonengineering.com