The extreme side of this (filling out an impact report when you've ordered pizza for the team) is definitely one of those lower levels of hell on a project. However, even as someone who is not a fan of process-heavy stuff, I think that some parts of this don't actually take into account that the PM also has responsibilites and that a project doesn't ideally just "run itself"*. =)

One of the PM's many responsibilities is to ensure that he and anyone else attached or interested to the project know "where things are at", sometimes a status report is one of those things. Now, if he is inflicting that on the team itself, then that itself is him trying to slough off his own job to the team. The timesheet thing you're joking around about (and maybe it doesn't have to be ridiculously detailed) is actually something needed to communicate actuals to a stakeholder. Like it or not, on a multimillion dollar project sometimes people want that accounted for. ;)

I'm not saying that there aren't bad PMs - in fact, they have the same problem the development community does in terms of having qualified people taking those roles. I think in my career I have worked with maybe 2-3 good PMs, and even then those 3 have had a *wide* variance in their style, so it's not like there's some rigorous standard (although you'd think so from PMBOK).

I don't have a big love of PMs, but don't be so harsh on the guys - they're the ones that have to deal with all the smelly, unshaven passive aggressives in their team all the time ;)

* When a project *does* "run itself", it's normally because one or more of the developers has a vague idea of how to manage a project/sprint and has taken that ownership.

The intent is to come down on PMs any more than The Ivory Tower Architect is meant to slam Architects in general. It's the ones that make you sit through a three-hour meeting every week to update each and every action in Microsoft Project that are at fault. From personal experience, I love having a good PM. They keep things going at a good pace and, more importantly, act as a buffer from some of the more outlandish requests from people outside the project.

Justice, I think that you missed the point of what we were trying to say. We acknowledge that projects need leadership and responsibility. We acknowledge that one of the primary roles that PMs take is to consolidate information and pass it to the people above them. In fact, I'd say that we embrace those traits in a PM.

What we were getting at was the fact that a Process-Heavy PM usually accomplishes those tasks at the detriment of productivity and morale on the team. A strong PM (with which I've worked a couple of times) will be both an enabler and a buffer. Good PMs don't let shit roll down hill until it absolutely needs to. Good PMs work hard to ensure that the team has the maximum number of barriers removed from their path.

The Process-Heavy PM burdens his/her team with these things. Instead of silently moving and acting around the team, they rely on the team members to make their job easy. The Process-Heavy PM will usually feel that their practice/process is sacrosanct and demands more attention and adherence than the act of creating what the business needs.

So, no, not all PMs are bad, but the Process-Heavy PM is.

I agree completley with Kyle on this one. I love having a good PM around, it's the ones that are constantly coming to my desk asking me "Where are we at with this, what's the status" that are really frustrating. Even more so when your involved with a number of different projects, and your priorities have led you to a different project out of necessity, and he/she's asking repeatedly for details on a delayed project. In a perfect world, you would be focused on one task at a time, in the real world, it just doesn't happen, people call in sick, people go on vacation,etc.