Do You Really Need a Project Manager for That?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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Where would the world be without project managers? Well, I might be ever-so-slightly biased, but I believe it would be a lot worse off if it weren’t for the tremendous benefits delivered by project management and PMs.

However, that doesn’t mean I believe project managers are the solution to every problem. I have recently started working with a client who believes any new one-off work item needs a project manager thrown at it, and that is causing all kinds of confusion. They don’t necessarily believe all those work items are projects, rather they feel as though successful management of the issue requires the skills a project manager brings.

What is project management?
To start to explore this article, we have to go right back to fundamentals and explore what project management is—or, more accurately, what this client’s interpretation of project management is. The environment consists of a lot of operational support functions, so most of the work they perform tends to be fairly tactical and small scale in nature; but it is still important to deliver complete solutions in a timely manner.

A lot of the requests are also one-time requests, so could technically be called projects. If this environment were IT support, there would be a well-established set of service management processes for dealing with these requests (service desk-type tickets …

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