Hiring or Assigning a Project Manager (Part 1)

Mike has more than 12 years of project management experience spanning a variety of industries. He has acted as a consultant for federal, state and local government agencies; set up a PMO and managed strategic projects for a major automotive company in Australia; and currently is a Senior Project Manager in the Northern Colorado financial industry. Mike is PMP certified, a veteran of the USAF and has an MBA in finance and accounting.

  Career Development   Strategy   Using PMI Standards  

Company executives are often faced with hiring or assigning project managers without having a strong background in projects themselves. In writing this article, I hope to provide a little insight and offer guidance for hiring managers and human resource professionals. In Part 1, I’ll address the following three key areas to consider when seeking a PM:

• Your company’s organizational structure
• The nature of the projects to be assigned
• The qualities of the project manager under consideration

In light of those considerations, in Part 2 we will look at the three most common approaches to selecting PMs that I have seen in the business world:

• Assigning the in-house subject matter expert
• Hiring a project management specialist
• Hiring a project management generalist

Now let’s take a look at this installment’s three main areas of consideration…

1. Your company’s organizational structure
There is a wide variety of organizational structures, cultures and styles, each with its own nuances. But they generally fall into three categories: 1. functional area-based structure, 2. matrix organizations and 3. project-based structures.

A purely functional area-based organization is aligned along departments such as accounting, marketing and sales with no formal Project Management Office or dedicated …

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