Project Management is Not Enough

Are you a software project manager? If so, your job is changing. It is no longer enough to keep the risk list up to date. It is not enough being the person to schedule the meetings and do the minutes. Knowing how to calculate earned value and critical path is the price you pay to even call yourself a project manager.

Great project managers take those skills for granted. Great project managers are defined by how well they lead their teams. Great software project managers establish context. They create organizational alignment and guide their projects toward successful project outcomes. Great project managers focus on team building, they open lines of communication, they trust people, respect and empower them, and maintain sufficient control to hold everyone accountable for project outcomes.

In my experience, project managers tend to look at themselves in one of two ways. Some PMs want to be at the center of the project, in control of everything, in the middle of every decision. Like the illustration on the right, they try to be the center of the wheel with all team members connecting through them.

Others lead from the boundaries, they create the context. They establish the parameters of the project, the outer limits. They trust the project team to deliver the desired outcomes within those limits. These project managers build teams, get them what they need to be successful, and remove any barriers that could stand in their way. The project manager on the left is intentional about creating and maintaining connections between team members and acting as the buffer to the rest of the organization.

Traditional project management tends to focus more on the science of project management and less on the leadership and team aspects. Agile can sometimes focus too much on the softer side. It's my view that the process driven, scientific side of project management should be a given. That is your ticket in the door. Its time we start hiring great project leaders. It's up to us to get serious about becoming great leaders.

Otherwise, don’t call yourself a project manager.

Photo Credit: www.projectstrategy.com

Comments

[Anthony Mersino]

Mike, great post. I agree with you wholeheartedly about the fact that PMs need to be great leaders and being competent in those basic project management skills is not sufficient.

I also agree that PMs need to get out of control mode. That is where I spent a lot of my project management career and it is a comfort zone for me. I admit to being a bit of a controller but hey, I've been seeing a therapist about it.

What I do not agree with is your assesment of the second type of project manager. I agree with the part about the PMs creating the boundaries and context for the project and to get team members connected and communicating. However, in my experience team members often fail to communicate effectively outside their own world which meant the project manager had to serve as a hub for communications. Team members rarely paid attention to upstream and downstream dependencies and things often didn't come together at the right times or didn't meet expectations of the downstream team or member.

I think it is a worthwhile goal, and it would sure make a PMs job easier, but I am not sure it is realistic to say that the PM can step back and assume that individuals and subteam are going to do the hard work of communications.

But like I said, I tend to be a controlling PM so this is just one man's humble opinion.

Thanks for the post!
Anthony Mersino
http://EQ4PM.com

[Steven Savage]

Definitely an issue I'm finding in my job and in my experience.

PMing comes from a background thats far more "industrial" than many jobs today - backgrounds that had leadership built in. As the discipline has spread, leadership has not always spread with it.

In my current job I essentially got dropped into a leadership-style PM role. I realized however it provided me a lot of opportunity.

[Kevin E. Schlabach]

Take this a step further... in large organizations where teams receive direction from Product Owners/customers, Project Managers, and Resource Managers... all of those managers should be thinking this way as they transition to agile. I'm not sure it's just a project manager thing.

Great article.