Project managers are busy people, it takes a lot of effort and communication to keep major web projects moving along, on time and within budget, whilst also handling a myriad of new requests, changes, problems and other difficulties emanating from both the client's team and from within the agency itself.
At any one time, project managers are doing this not just for a single project but for multiple projects, all at different stages of the development process. Some projects may just be starting whilst others are nearing completion.
This variety of projects, clients and constant activity means that whilst the project management role is always interesting it can also be extremely challenging and demanding.
I know this from experience, having been a project manager before becoming a tester and setting up WebDepend. What I found was that this the demanding nature of managing web projects within an agency environment becomes relentless over time and led me to the verge of burnout.
In fact, a survey from LinkedIn in 2024, which surveyed 16,450 professionals in the U.S, found that project managers were the most likely to suffer from burnout. They had highest rate of burnout amongst all 26 job functions surveyed at 50%.
There are many aspects that contribute to a project manager's workload and stress levels but one of the bigger ones, in my experience, is testing.
As the development work nears completion, it is time to test the website before handing it over to client's for their testing, or UAT. For the agencies that do not have dedicated testers, the testing phase often falls between developers, designers and the project manager.
In this scenario the responsible person for the testing of the project is usually the project manager, coordinating everything.
Naturally, developers do test their own work so when the development work is finished, it has undergone their own 'testing'. However, developers are often focused on the building of things and can struggle to switch their mindset to testing. Also, testing your own work is never easy, there is a tendency to overlook things.
Designers are naturally focused on the visual aspects of the project, checking the build resemble the original designs, making sure the elements are styled correctly, the layout adapts to mobile screen sizes, that kind of thing.
So, developers do their own testing but, due to the nature of testing their own work, will miss things. Designers focus mostly on visual aspects and UX, checking how their designs have been turned into the built website. Everyone has limited time because testing is not their primary role and they would much rather be building or designing. However, it often leaves the project manager to test everything else and make sure that project overall is in an adequate shape to be handed over to the client.
This leads to some issues that can become worse in subsequent projects, such as:
Testing needs dedicated, focused time spent and more time is required for more complex projects. How much focused time do project managers have in order to carry out testing effectively? In between calls with clients, meetings with developers or designers, handling requests and dealing with problems. The answer is usually very little.
So, in order to get this focused time, some project managers resort to working early mornings, late evenings or weekends to carry out the tasks they need to focus on. I remember in my day as a project manager, I had so many things vying for my attention that I could only grab a short amount of time to do any meaningful testing. It is simply not enough.
Because not enough focused time is spent on testing, the testing itself suffers because it is too shallow. The more obvious bugs might be picked up but there isn't enough time for deeper testing, or sufficient testing across different devices, accessibility, performance, etc.
For more complex projects, there may be many different scenarios to think about and cover during testing. When there isn't enough time these scenarios are not thought about and so the testing does not go far enough to find the bugs hiding there.
Shallow testing and not enough time spent testing means that the project is handed over to clients in a state that could be described as 'undercooked'. There are bugs, sometimes unfinished areas or gaps that the client finds and becomes unhappy about.
Depending on the client's relationship with the agency this can lead to significant damage for the agency's reputation. Not only that, there is rework that's needed to fix the bugs the client found and possibly do extra work to appease the client and get them back onside.
After the unexpected and unestimated rework, perhaps a bit extra to appease the client, the project is now behind schedule and probably over budget. Less profit for the agency or, in particularly bad cases, no profit at all for the agency.
There is another knock-on impact in that the agency can't start the next project because the team is still doing the rework and bug fixes for the delayed project.
All of this is managed by the project manager - dealing with the overruns, putting in extra time on evenings and weekends, doing extra work to keep frustrated clients onside, revising timelines and preparing for stressful launches.
Over time and across many projects, this relentless merry-go-round of working to constant deadlines, launches and the associated stress can lead project managers to burn out.
All is not lost for project managers, especially in agencies where there is no tester on the team. Get a tester involved in testing your web projects. The tester does not have to be full-time and, if you use our On Demand services you can have one of our experienced testers working for you whenever you need them.
This takes some of the stress away from project managers whilst also ensuring that full testing is carried out.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
