The No-Drama PM, Part 2

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.

  Career Development   New Practitioners   ProjectsAtWork  

Project managers avoid drama and unnecessary stress by understanding the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved, starting with their own. In Part 1 of this series, we outlined the reasons why we run projects and why defined roles are so important. Now let’s dive deeper into the “what and how” of the project manager role.

This is the second 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.

So, what is the role of the project manager? The project manager is responsible for three completely different functions. For simplicity, let’s break them up into the What, the How, and the How It’s Going. A good project manager is tasked with executing on all three roles, sometimes separately, sometimes overlapping, sometimes simultaneously. Failure at any one of the three will probably cause the project to fail. Conversely, if all three are done well, you’ll get the comments that the project was easy, because everything seemed to go so smoothly.

First, the management of the What. Even if you’re blessed with a project that is completely understood, with full and robust requirements and complete alignment among your stakeholder community when the project starts, everything is subject to change, …

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