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The Project Manager’s job is to manage the project on a day-to-day basis to bring it to a successful conclusion. Usually, as Project Manager, you’re accountable to a senior manager who’s the project sponsor, or to a small group of managers who form a project steering committee or project board. The Project Manager’s job is also challenging. For instance, you’re often coordinating technically specialised professionals – who may have limited experience working together – to achieve a common goal.

The Project Manager’s position is a role; it’s not about status. In Chapter 9 we explain why team members and the Project Manager must understand their responsibilities and authority within the project, independent of organisational grade or rank. Similarly, if you’re doing team work as well as project managing, you must be clear about both roles and only wear one hat at a time.

The Project Manager’s role requires hard skills such as planning and costing, but also soft people skills. Your success requires a keen ability to identify and resolve sensitive organisational and interpersonal issues.

Looking at the Project Manager’s tasks

Your role as the Project Manager is one of day-to-day responsibility for the project. Whether the project is large or small, the responsibilities are the same; it’s just the scale and complexity that are different. You’re required to:

✓ Sketch out initial ideas for the project and outline costs and timescales.

✓ Plan the project, including mapping out the controls that will be put in place, defining what quality the project needs and how it will be achieved, and analysing risk and planning control actions.

✓ Control the flow of work to teams (or perhaps just team members in a smaller project).

✓ Motivate and support teams and team members.

✓ Liaise with external suppliers.

✓ Liaise with management staff if the project is one of a group of projects being coordinated as a programme.

✓ Ensure that the project deliverables are developed to the right level of quality.

✓ Keep track of progress and adjust to correct any minor drifts off the plan.

✓ Keep track of spending.

✓ Go to others, such as the steering committee, if things go more significantly off track (for example, the whole project is threatened).

✓ Report progress, such as to the sponsor, steering committee or project office.

✓ Keep track of risks and ensure control actions are taken.

✓ Deal with any problems, involving others as necessary.

✓ Decide on changes, getting approval from others where you don’t have personal authority to make a decision (for example, when changes involve very high cost).

✓ Plan successive delivery stages in more detail.

✓ Close the project down in an orderly way when everything’s done.

So, the tasks will keep you very busy but they will also be very enjoyable if you’re a Project Manager at heart.

Avoiding ‘shortcuts’

The short-term pressures of your job, particularly if you’re fitting in project management alongside other work, may tempt you to cut corners. That’s not the same as adjusting the project management needs to the project, but rather missing stuff out altogether that you really should have done.

Resist the temptation to cut corners, because usually doing so comes back and bites you later when you face unnecessary problems, or delay, in the project.