So, last Friday I asked “What’s the point of project managers?” Not surprisingly, as a project manager myself, I think project managers are very useful! But I wanted to throw it open to you guys, and see what reasons you have for the importance of project managers. And you didn’t let me down, especially on LinkedIn!

John Burke says:
“Having someone trying to manage a project alongside the day job has never worked successfully wherever I’ve seen it tried. The individuals, when stretched with ever increasing workloads, have always reverted to completing day job tasks first at the expense of the project”

Dveirel Kovalsky says:
“Project managers contribute to the Knowledge Management and ‘wisdom’ of the company as an asset.”

Mahesh Subramaniam says:
“It is only the project manager whose sole aim is to keep an eye on the deliverables and align the individual objectives towards the common goal of delivering the business product that represents more or less the vision of all interested parties on the project.”

Karl Geppert says:
“The project manager is the valve between the business and the project team. They are needed to focus the whole project team on the business outcome ensure that this is planned, scheduled and delivered on targeted date and content.”

Tom Andries says:
“What’s the point of an architect? What’s the point of a clown? What’s the point of a designer?
With each profession are associated a set of skills that an individual tries to embody and practice.”

Mark Parrish says:
“Since most people got into PM as a SME, I think that they could do it. If people had the time and training.”

As for me, in common with many of these comments, I believe that a full-time project manager provides much more value above a part-time one than he costs. Yes, as Mark Parrish says, with training, the tools we use, the processes we follow, these can be learned, but that doesn’t make you a project manager.

Ultimately, a project manager needs to manage the project well, and for most of us this means, wherever possible, making sure the project is completed in a successful manner. And that takes more than pieces of paper.

Imagine the all too familiar situation that one of the project tasks is stalled, because the person working on it needs information from someone else in the organisation – information that just isn’t forthcoming. The monitoring of the project you have been doing means you have become aware of this problem, and that means you need to take steps to solve it. So what do you do? Well, you go to where the information is supposed to be coming from, and you talk to them, you smooth things over, you negotiate with them to get the information the project needs delivered as soon as possible.

These are the kind of soft skills you must have. You have to be a manager, laying down the law to team members who aren’t pulling their weight – and supporting them to solve whatever is stopping them. You have to be a negotiator, making sure suppliers, internal and external, deliver what the project needs when it needs it. You have to be a politician, talking to senior managers to make sure the staff the project needs are available at the right time. You need to be an advisor, giving the Executive the information he needs to make decisions about the project.

In short, you need to be a problem solver. You need to be able to handle any of the situations project management can throw at you. Some of this can be improved by training. A lot more of it can be improved through experience. But a lot of it is down to your own personal inclinations. Regardless of the type of projects you do, regardless of the industry area, you are going to have to be good at dealing with people. You could be working on the most high-tech space-age wonder gadgets, but it will still be people that will cause your biggest problems – and give you your greatest successes.

To be this kind of person usually takes: time, to gain the bitter experience; effort, to learn the tools, techniques and processes; and the right personality, one that enjoys solving these types of problems.

Now, that’s not to say that a member of the team couldn’t do these things, and be good at them. But the skills that make someone, say, a good programmer, aren’t necessarily the same skills that would make a good project manager. And besides, wouldn’t you rather have your good programmers spending their time actually programming, instead of project managing?

I’ll leave you with the most poetic of the comments received, from Eugenio Magnone:
“Scattered bright and colorful pebbles do not create a mosaic.”