Integrity: The Project Manager's Level

As I write this, there’s a guy in my garage--or what used to be a garage until the home renovation bug bit--laying ceramic tile. He’s amazingly good at this little project: smoothing out the rough spots in the old concrete, gently placing the pieces into a perfect whole, not messing up what is already working well. He has only two tools in there with him: a trowel and a level.

Naturally, this image brings up thoughts of project manager competence.

Okay, so I think about project management more than is healthy. But there is a conceptual bridge from my tilesetter’s tools to the issue of what makes a project work well.

Project manager competence is one of the great unknowns, a kind of blank space on the map of our knowledge base. As we speak, research is going on now within organizations like PMI and elsewhere to define exactly what “competence” means in this field. Meanwhile, it seems like every topic I cover on project management, from tool selection to metrics to estimating, eventually comes down to the same conclusion: “It’s the human factor, stupid.”