No more project managers? Time to celebrate!

Why do we still have project managers? Hasn’t their time been and gone? That’s not to say that project management isn’t important, but do we really need a specific role for it anymore?

Projects are Business As Usual

For many organisations, continual projects are the new normal. Often the same team will carry on from one project to another. While the end product and the client may change, the team works together for months or years at a time.

And that means the team’s manager is very far away from the common idea of a matrix-managing, temporary project management expert brought in to deliver the project that many think of as a project manager.

Project management becomes just one part of a manager’s role

In these situations, there’s little difference between a project team’s “project manager” and the manager of any other team in a business. While how they manage the workflow may be different, does it really make the role so different that we need a specific name for it?

Instead, isn’t it the case that the project management parts of their job are just one of the many hats they need to wear as a manager?

Project management is just a set of techniques, not a role

So do we really need so many “project managers”? Is there really enough difference between project management and general management to require a separate professional career path?

I’ve got my own thoughts about this, but what do you think? Are you a project manager, or are you a manager who happens to do projects?

(Image courtesy of IMLS DCC. Some rights reserved.)

I needed to do a quick ten-minute presentation recently about the factors needed for successful projects. This is what I came up with – let me know what you think! What are your ideas?

Comparison and evaluation - "Which is better?"

Project management is all about making sure we have better projects. Sometimes a better project is one that delivers what is needed on time and on budget. (Or earlier and cheaper.) Sometimes the only thing that could make a project better is to stop it, so the business doesn’t waste any more money on something it doesn’t need, or already has.

But that’s all project management is about – better projects.

It may be you’d like to introduce new technology into your projects. Or perhaps you have some new management techniques you want to use instead of the old ones. That’s fine – if they produce better projects.

When you use these new things, do they make your projects better? Yes, this is hard to measure over individual projects – after all, each project is different. But over time, groups of projects will have enough similarities to be compared with other groups of projects. So measure to see if your projects are better – quicker, cheaper, or higher quality. (Though quality that goes beyond your specs may not necessarily make a project better.)

All of this takes work, and time. It takes work to deliver projects in your new way. It takes time to build up enough to be able to compare them to other projects – either your own from the past, or other people’s who aren’t using these new things. And it takes both work and time to analyse these results. But that’s the only way you can tell if you new thing is letting you deliver better projects.

And that’s all we’re here to do.

(Image courtesy of WhiteAfrican. Some rights reserved.)