Here’s a selection of project management articles I’ve been reading over the last week. Hope you find them useful!

• Project Manager By Choice or Default? – PM Hut
  

  The reasons for assigning a project manager role to an individual from within an organization are sound ones – knowledge of the company, its products and people should by no means be underestimated. But whether that person has the necessary skills to lead a project is not always taken into account and there can be just as many problems with promoting internally as in hiring an unknown, but experienced, person from a different organization who has specifically chosen this profession.

• Making Decisions Like Sherlock Holmes – Herding Cats
  

  Just as in The Sign of Four, Holmes makes use of these three powers to solve crimes. A PM can make use the same three powers to make decisions on the project.

Working in IT project management, I’ve had a lot of experience in building interfaces as part of my projects. But the important ones are nothing to do with the technology.

When you are working on an IT project, it can be too easy to get carried away with the technical possibilities. I have worked with many excellent technical staff, some of whom are more interested in seeing how far they can push the technology than in ‘just’ hitting the requirements.

Often they find it difficult to explain how the new possibilities the technology opens up could be applied in the business. Sometimes they don’t know – your technical staff will not know everything the business needs to do. Sometimes it’s because they aren’t able to explain it in terms that the rest of the business understands.

This is where you as a project manager can help. As well as running the project, you are also a major link between the project and the external environment. You are, in fact, an interface between what is going on inside, and what is going on outside.

For many of the projects I have worked on, an important part of my role has been to explain the technical process to others, and in turn explain business requirements back into technical steps that need to be taken.

The only way to do this is through listening – listening to what your technical team is telling you, and listening to what the business, or non-technical members of the team, are telling you. Only by listening can you find out both what is possible, and what is needed.

Interfaces aren’t dumb devices that just parrot what one side says to the other. They also need to do some conversion, some translation, to make sure both sides understand each other clearly.

So remember, listen carefully, understand what is being said, and make sure you help others understand too.