Technology and systems help in managing the mechanics of project management.
But you'll need to rely on your leadership skills to help get things done.
To talk to people, motivate the team and use
your interpersonal and soft skills to help smooth
over anything that can't be managed until the project is
completed and both management and leadership aspects are complete.
Think of it this way, managers manage projects and leaders lead people.
But in order to for a project to be successful, you need to be able to do both.
So, now that we know that the project manager is responsible for
the management and leadership of the project, what does it truly mean?
What are the expectations?
Let's look at some of the roles of a project manager both as a manager and a leader.
As a project manager,
you'll be expected to identify the requirements of the project.
What does a client actually want? How will it be delivered?
Address the needs, concerns,
and expectations of the project's stakeholders.
Deliver the desired result to your stakeholders once the product is actually complete.
Plan and execute communications to your stakeholders throughout the project.
Making sure you keep them informed and comfortable with the status of the project.
The product manager will do all this while
managing the competing project constraints of scope,
quality, schedule, budget, resources and risk, just to name a few.
This is a lot of responsibility.
So, how you do this as the project manager?
You will lead the team,
create the vision of success,
and communicate that vision to the project team,
inform the project's stakeholders.
As I said before, keeping the project stakeholders informed is critical.
Link the strategy to the execution of the project.
This means taking the project management tools
and plan and turning it into a complete project.
Established with the stakeholder needs in mind the scope, budget, and schedule.
And manage all of these functions throughout the course of the project.
I refer to the scope,
budget and schedule as the Iron Triangle.
If you think of your project as an equilateral triangle,
where each side must be equal,
any change to one side automatically impacts the other two.
If you increase your scope,
it will increase your time or your schedule and cost.
If you decrease your budget, your costs,
you'll have to reduce your scope which will decrease your time and schedule.
This is a simple way to consider changes to
any one area and how this will affect the other two.
So, what are the factors might influence your project?
These factors can be both internal or external but either way
they'll make an impact on
how your project runs and will be managed by the project manager.
We call these enterprise environmental factors
and these apply to every project management process.
You'll see this throughout the entire process.
Let's look at a project and some of the common environmental factors that
need to be considered. Organizational culture.
This includes structure and governance,
the rules of the organization,
the geographic distribution of your resources,
where are your materials and people located or
are they collocated or are they situated around the world?
Infrastructure. What already exists inside the organization?
Is there a department or office that can help,
are there people to assist you in this process or this endeavor?
Information technology software.
This consists of scheduling software,
configuration management tools, and automated systems.
The resource availability.
This includes contracting, purchasing constraints,
approved providers, contractors, et cetera.
Employee availability.
Do you have enough people to do the job and do they have the right skills?
Finally, other factors.
This can be anything from subcontract negotiations,
to shipping delays, to unforeseen weather incidents.
You may not be able to plan for these but you need to understand that they exist.