Slow motion disasters are painful
I was on a project once where the company brought in a terrible outside manager. We where told he was a project manager at Mapquest, personally I always wondered if he was pulling some scam on the company.
Not the sort of micromanager you faced here, he was the exact opposite. Even after managing the project for a month he didn't know the names of the people on the project. Barely technical enough to handle his own email on a project where he had to be the technical lead. When there where problems he liked to make up reasons for the customer, stuff that made no sense. Email from the customer sat at his desk for days and then where personally garbled before being sent to us, and vice versa.
He was fired after a couple of months because the customer came back and said they where going to take their buisness someplace else if they had to work with this guy.
But while he was on the project it was a slow motion disaster. Progress on the project ground to a halt and we spent all out time trying to keep things going despite the layer of mud that management created. It is painful working on a project you know is doomed, and twice as bad if you had any personal investment in the project.
I guess the lesson to take from this is that the company your working for is secondary to the manager you directly work for. No matter how good the company, a bad manager can make a project hell. And conversly, a good manager can make working for a bad company tolerable.
Jay
