Hiring or Assigning a Project Manager (Part 2)

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   Talent Management  

In Part 1 of this series, we noted that human resource professionals and other hiring managers are often tasked with selecting a project manager without having a strong background in projects themselves. We looked at three key areas of consideration to help guide them when faced with such an assignment. Those considerations are:

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

In light of this, we will now 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

Let’s look at each in turn…

Assigning the in-house subject matter expert
I said I would address the three most common approaches I have observed…I didn’t say they were all best practices. Assigning the in-house subject matter expert (SME) is all too often the default approach--and it can be a trap except under specific circumstances. For that reason, I will expound on this approach a little more extensively than the other two.

Have you experienced a situation similar to the following scenario? Business executives are gathered around the boardroom conference table having just …

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