The Project Manager as Knowledge Broker
Paul has run a plethora of projects in multiple industries throughout his 20-year career, ranging from process improvement to agile to most recently cyber-security. Paul is also a reputable speaker, drawing practical and humorous conclusions from the "trenches" of his employers. Paul's dedication as a PM practitioner started decades ago, when he became one of the first 10,000 people to earn the PMP.
There are many forms of “brokers” in our world today. A broker is any sort of intermediary that we hire to make a match for us. Examples are plentiful: A stockbroker can take a pile of my money and invest it so that the pile will get bigger. An insurance broker who knows my needs and works with large insurers covers all my personal risks (car, home, serious illness, life, etc.). Companies hire recruiters to find candidates to match a specific need. It is still a practice in some countries today to hire a broker as a marital match maker! As project managers, is there anything that we “broker”?
Yes, indeed. In my experience, the key thing I broker when I run my projects is knowledge. In order to do the work of the project, the project manager has to ensure that knowledge is being imparted and that the benefactor of that knowledge is receiving it. Can the work of project management be boiled down to this simple paradigm?
Nearly all of the project managers that I know moved into the profession from something else (voluntarily or involuntarily). Most of us did not study project management in a university, nor did we go through a formal apprenticeship or residency like a doctor would. We were handed projects to work on and we relied on our skills previously acquired to run the project. When the inevitable skill gaps manifested themselves, we had to …
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