The Skills of a Project Manager
We’ve previously looked at the different environments that projects might operate in, and the types of projects that will happen and occur. We’ve looked at the reasons for initiating those projects and many other things in the lead up to the start of a project. Now we’re looking at the role of a project manager, and this is so important because the project manager ultimately is the glue that gels everything together and helps deliver that business value through a project. In other words the project manager plays a critical role in the leadership of a project team in order to achieve those project objectives.
The project manager the role also changes to fit an organization. There’ll be many different project types and styles, and many different organizational ways of working. This includes varying degrees of authority and responsibilities depending on the type of organization.
We might have things like working before the project initiation, for example tailoring the ideas to executives, coming up with a business case to help initiate that project and start with a Project Charter. After the project happens we might be measuring business benefits and making sure that we’ve actually delivered what we said we were going to deliver, and that we got the business value that we said we were going to get.
This is before and after, not to mention all the things that go on during the execution and planning, monitoring and controlling of the project itself. There’s a great analogy that the PMBOK guide gives us, and that is likening the Project Manager role to an orchestra. For example, in an orchestra your overall objective is to play beautiful music or a beautiful song. With a project it’s not a song but you’re delivering value to your audience and to your customers – simiarly an orchestra is helping change their mood you’re making them melancholy or making them excited or happy through your music. You’re delivering business value through a project but you you need someone to manage that entire Orchestra, and to manage that entire project team. You’re not going to do it all alone, you’re not going to do it by yourself.
As the project manager you’re going to have team leaders for each different section in the same way that you’ve got a trumpet section, a saxophone section, a timpani or drums or percussion section, and then the actual instruments themselves playing that music. Just like the team members within your project teams leading up to the project manager that are delivering your business value. The project manager also helps to find those roles, for example those team leader roles, the roles that you know you will need to deliver that value within the project, securing those team members and helping fulfill those project objectives and we do that initially through the project Charter, which is a document that helps build a business case, an initial idea, the reason why we’re starting the project, the initial stakeholders, initial risks and maybe even a potential small amount of scope, a small flightplan idea to kick off a project and initiate that project.
Then we actually run the project through the Project Management Plan. This document gets baselined for a snapshot or a moment in time and then it gets adjusted as the project goes along, to how things are going. Like the orchestra, a large project might have more than a hundred project team members and it’s all led by the project manager. They need to coordinate those team members who may fulfill many different roles, in different industries such as IT, design, development, communications, testing and you’ve got the integration of these environments.
All of those things need to be thought of and aligned when you’re in the project manager role.
Even though a project manager doesn’t need all of that actual information themselves – they don’t need to be able to play every single instrument – it does have help to have a little bit of technical knowledge. For example, the conductor will need to know how to read music, and they’ll need to know if someone’s going too fast too slow, or is in the right section or the wrong section at a given time. So for that they need a little bit of technical knowledge about the environment that they’re in, whether it’s IT, or in construction, or in automotive. Along with that technical knowledge, even though it doesn’t have to be vast, part of it is influencing, communicating and managing. All of that is basically what we would call leading, and leadership as a project manager is to help make those things happen.
Sometimes you have to cajole people into trying to do these things, maybe it’s not their usual job but you do need them to get things done even though you’re not their usual manager. It can be very difficult. But these are the skills that you need.
For those reasons the project manager is quite a different role to other functional managers. For example, you’ve got your functional manager who might provide oversight for a functional business unit, and this is just the usual BAU, business as usual. There’s an Operations Manager who is responsible for ensuring that business operations are efficient. Operations managers really are streamlining things and helping things run as best as they possibly can. The project manager being on a project that takes us from one state to another desired state (hopefully better) and a project manager is assigned to lead the team responsible for delivering that change in business value.
– David McLachlan