Who is the Project Manager?

A project manager is a professional in the field of project management. Project managers can have the responsibility of the planning, execution, and closing of any project, typically relating to construction industry, architecture, computer networking, telecommunications or software development. Many other fields in the production, design and service industries also have project managers.

A project manager is the person accountable for accomplishing the stated project objectives. Key project management responsibilities include creating clear and attainable project objectives, building the project requirements, and managing the triple constraint for projects, which is cost, time, and scope.

A project manager is often a client representative and has to determine and implement the exact needs of the client, based on knowledge of the firm they are representing. The ability to adapt to the various internal procedures of the contracting party, and to form close links with the nominated representatives, is essential in ensuring that the key issues of cost, time, quality and above all, client satisfaction, can be realized. The project manager job is an interesting job. Running a project means that no two days for you are alike. There are new challenges and bridges to cross on daily basis in your trajectory to accomplish the project objectives.

 

Project Management Skills

Project management skills require that you tolerate politics and can manage people. As a project manager, you have to manage your own team and the relationship with other departments who are either stakeholders or suppliers of certain components for your project.

Leadership skill is the art of the project management skills. Project management is all about getting people to do what you want as a project manager. You need to establish who will work with you and who will work against you. Informal chats help a lot in this sense. Your previous experience with colleagues helps, of course.

As you start your project management job, you will notice that these skills are essential:

• Team Building
• Conflict Resolution
• Negotiation
• Lobbying
• Delegation
• Mentoring
• Coaching and Training
• Communication and Presentation skills are key skills of the project management skills required for a successful project manager. As a project manager, you need to convince many department heads of helping you accomplish the project objectives. Your presentation skills with be of at most importance.
• During any project, your Time Management skill as a project manager could be mean your survival. Wasting time on unproductive meetings, or unscheduled lengthy phone calls could add to your stress and cause the project to fail.
• Your "Know How" of the project subject matter is very important. You need not be a very technical person in the subject matter to manage a project. However, you still need and require some background to it. Don’t expect a civil engineer project manager to manage an IT programming project. It simply does not work.

Tip: Be careful, project managers are looked at the people who don’t have a real job. It is a perception that you might have to live with.

The project management skills require that you understand the following in more details:

• Project manager job
• Software development lifecycle
• Initial project planning process
• Project team building
• Project financial planning
• Project implementation plan

 

The Project Manager Job

The project manager job focuses on certain responsibilities and challenges during the execution of the project such as:

• The project itself in terms of meeting its Objectives, Budget and Schedule.
• Your Team: working as one team and keeping everyone informed is a real challenge. Most probably, you will face the misconception that you left someone behind. Don’t worry, inform him or her and make sure that the process never fails you again. Team building exercises don’t have to be outside the office. The project team should always get together formally and informally to bond or as it’s called now a days "Loving".
• Your Employer: You need to maintain the expected benefits of the project to your employer. You need to maintain the ethics, and policies of your organization. The information sharing with management, secrets of the project, and lessons learned are of most importance.

 

Project Manager Challenges

The project manager job brings with it many challenges. It is a fact that project managers are responsible, but they rarely have the authority.

You cannot "force" others to help you accomplish the project. You have no authority over them. You have to convince them to assist you. This is where your Leadership skills kick in.

Most likely, your team members will come from different department and backgrounds. In a short time, you are expected to get them all to sing, i.e. work, together in harmony. Your management skills should help you face this challenge which is a common phenomenon of the project manager role.

An interesting challenge we noticed with the project manager role is that he or she never have a say in the target date. This date is usually set by the customer or management. Proper scheduling and resource planning should help you around this challenge.

Some project managers are able to deal with such types of stress by taking the stress and don’t passing it to their teams, other project managers just transfer the stress to their teams.

“Project Management can be defined as… a way of developing structure in a complex project, where the independent variables of time, cost, resources and human behavior come together.” - Rory Bruke, 1999.