Effective PM? Just Manage the basics

Project Management, they say, is as simple as it is difficult. Project Managers don’t really code hands on, don’t really test hands on, and yet, any Project manager will tell you, that this is really a tremendously difficult job.

It wouldn’t be incorrect to say that a PM is the face of the project; he is the soul of the project, and a PM can easily make or break a project. He needs to have the answers, the right answers, and timely answers, about all questions of the project.

IT projects and IT project management, have mostly unchanged expectations from the IT PM. In the last decade, the advent of social networks, mobile ecosystems and the cloud, have rendered the word “Technologies” rather incomplete. Today, there is no one technology, no one TECHNICAL PM. More than ever, I believe the role of the basic fundamental Project Manager has become more pronounced.

So then, what are the most important characteristics that one needs to have, to be a good PM? I’ll vote for the following 5:

1)      Ability to Tie things together: So many items of information, such numbers of activities to be done, multiple stakeholders; there is far too many things in a project to possibly complete. A PM should be able to formulate an action plan FROM THIS POINT on- a basic listing of activities, owners, dates and dependencies. Nothing helps more.

2)      Document it, lest you forget: Most mistakes happen not because you didn’t know about them, but because you didn’t document them the last time they happened. And this time, they are gonna be worse.

3)      Don’t say that’s not my job: A leader does, and a manager makes sure it gets done. Therefore, everything is your job- you may not be responsible to do it yourself, but you are accountable to get it done. Things like DB creation, migration, deployment, interfaces, architecture, are all that are pivotal to the project, and these are also the things that a PM is pivotal TO.

4)      Communicate and track correctly: There really is just one way to do this most effectively- track and communicate the planned versus actuals. Tie point 1 and this together, and you have a zero deviation project. Remember, re-scheduling is not the same as delaying. Communicate early and you have the flexibility of re-scheduling. Miss the communication, and you have delayed. Simple as that.

5)      Entrepreneurial aggression: There is something about entrepreneurs that makes them aggressive, “I’ll do it come what may” types. A PM needs to be like that. There is gonna be a thousand things a PM is going to have to do IMMEDIATELY- DB requests, execution scripts, deployment even at times. There may be a million things- approvals, reviews, signoffs, status reports from subordinates and so on, that are not going to be easy to come by unless the PM pushes hard. All these call for the kind of raw aggression entrepreneurs typically exhibit.