The No-Drama PM

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Leadership   PMO   Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Much of the unwanted drama we face as project managers comes from people not understanding their roles and responsibilities. When people don’t know what is expected of them, they rarely perform well. It’s our job to make sure that doesn’t happen. But first, we must understand our role — and why we really want it.

This is the first in a series of excerpts from “No-Drama Project Management”  — a new book that explores the preventable problems that cause project failures and how to steer clear of them.

People have likened being a project manager to being one part professional bull fighter, one part air-traffic controller, one part toddler daycare director, and one part therapist. It’s a job that can be filled with enormous levels of stress, vast amounts of accountability, and often virtually no actual authority. Couple that with the need to make frightening decisions on a nearly daily basis, with limited (and sometimes inaccurate) information, while supporting a team that has as varied and diverse a set of needs as any group imaginable, and you begin to understand what a project manager goes through.

Rarely does the project manager have the authority to fire someone, hire someone, give someone a bonus or pay cut, or even decide which person works on which project. In fact, many project managers have to beg just for the ability to take their team out to lunch once in a…

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