IT Project Management Role — where does it stand?
Been into project management for over a decade and still the fascination towards it hasn’t ended, Project manager as a role is maintaining a balance among three repelling forces, Organization (senior management), Employees and Customers. If you look carefully the KRAs of each of these forces are mostly opposite to each other. Organization wants maximum margins and Customer good and cheaper service. Organization wants good employees with reasonable cost and employees want maximum pay with good benefits. Customer wants freebies; organization wants everything to be charged as far as possible. Hope you got the drift, now project management role is the one who stands in the center of all these forces and his job is to make sure that all three parties are happy and at the same time projects goals are also achieved. You can debate about which one of these forces are most important to project managers over others but in reality each one has its own importance and project manager should know how to balance among them. You can even add sales & presales into this equation but generally project manager don’t need to worry about balancing or managing them directly.
Entry level to project management is much easier or at least perceived as very easy (unlike programming), hence you find project managers starting with just having fair communication to those who are well versed in 9 areas of project management, the gap is wide open. This is also one of the reasons that you have a lot of project managers in the market but finding a good one is always a challenge, in fact certain traits of good project management like situational leadership, assertiveness, diplomacy, ownership, being non-political etc are so difficult to evaluate in an interview process. I am not saying you cannot but it is difficult and sometime you also get tricked by the interviewee on theseJ.
In one instance, I got a tech lead into my team from an another division, who claimed he was good in technology but wanted to move to project management, apparently his communication was not good and I advised him to stick to technology having spent a decade there. 15 days into the project and I figured out that he wasn’t even fit to be called a senior engineer, and every time I confronted on his bad performance he use to defend and end-up saying he would wish to become a project manager. As days passed I realized that the guy knew he will not sustain in technology and wasn’t finding a job elsewhere and he interpreted project management as a safe bet to retain his job in the company. The point I am trying to drive is people perceive that if they are half good in communication they can become a project manager, which would immediately give them power to manage a team and they personally don’t have to do much. Part of the reason for this is senior management as well, who tent to allow these people to dwell for a long time in a single a project with mediocre performance instead of reprimanding them and being candid about their career prospects.
Last week when I was attending the Scrum certification, I felt project manager role is dead, well not yet but it may reach that stage if Scrum succeeds majorly and gets adopted across the board. In Scrum around 50% of a typical project manager’s responsibilities is taken away and split between product owner and Scrum team leaving the Scrum master to just manage the process, be a problem solver and protect the team from external forces. Good example being if the team is delayed in a particular sprint it is not the responsibility of the Scrum Master but the team. Well, the Scrum master will be responsible if there is a process issue but other than that it is primarily for the Scrum team to figure out how to resolve the delay. Another one, if a sprint needs to be terminated, the deciding authority is the team and the product owner and the not Scrum master. One more, team assigns the tasks to itself and not the Scrum master. Unlike the traditional world where the project manager has around 8 to 12 years of experience with engineering background and has gradually grown to become a project manager, Scrum master can be played by anyone who has Scrum process knowledge and has leadership skills to resolve problems, this can also be one of the Scrum team member (QA, Designer, Architect, Lead) playing a part-time role of Scrum master. If you are project manager, there may be some transformation coming your way. Watch out.
Yet another enigma of project management, how much weight does a generic project management role carry, I mean one who is a project manager without having knowledge in specific domain or technology. I would say very less, try finding a job as generic project manager and you will realize that there are not many options around (in IT at least), lot of big companies look for domain knowledge, smaller ones wants to have PMs with technology knowledge so they can manage both technology and management part of it and one who are willing to hire generic project manager are preferring to hire good B-School grads and train them as they are less expensive (compared to a 10 years experience guy) and perceived to be smarter with a shorter learning curve.
Of course there is lot more to project management role, will write more about in my coming blogs.
Originally published at vkankaria.blogspot.com on April 28, 2018.
