Project Management

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criticality of domain for project/program managers

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Rajesh Shankaranarayana General Manager| Mindtree Limited Bangalore, Karnataka, India
what are your thoughts on project/program managers need for knowing the domain? and where have you seen this being useful
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Adrian Carlogea Australia
Aug 02, 2019 9:42 AM
Replying to Bob Thomas
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I disagree with Sergio. It depends upon the domain. It is better to have domain knowledge, but not necessary. I have worked many projects where I had no prior domain experience, such as entertainment and philanthropy. I learned the domains and succeed in all of them. I would not however, attempt to enter a field like medical devices.
As a PM you can manage projects in any domain as long as you are not given authority to take important decisions.

There are many project management related activities that can be performed without having domain knowledge, such as requesting resources, ensuring the work is assigned to team members (even if you don't understand the work in details), tracking and reporting, looking after the project budget, scheduling and chairing meetings, facilitating planning, acting as the first point of contact for the project, managing stakeholder communication, etc.

You can be successful in performing activities like the ones above but you will never be successful in taking important project decisions without good domain knowledge. You deserve less credit for the success of the project if you don't have good domain knowledge and haven't taken important decisions.

So yes, theoretically you can manage projects if you don't have domain knowledge and also can have an important contribution but you will never be fully in charge of the project in these conditions.
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Keith Novak Tukwila, Wa, United States
An interesting distinction occurred to me while reading other responses to this topic. There is a big difference between joining a team as a PM without domain knowledge, and managing the entire project without ever gaining any domain knowledge.

I would virtually guarantee that for those of us who say we have very successfully led projects in which we had no domain knowledge when we joined the team as the PM, we learned a lot along the way about what was going on around us, and the critical factors to make the project successful. We didn't make the hard technical decisions, but we figured out how to translate those decisions into a solid plan.
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Adrian Carlogea Australia
Some years ago, I worked on a data migration project in a technical role. A colleague of mine was the technical lead on a part of the project and he had decided to do the work differently in order to improve both the speed of development as well as the speed it took to migrate the data.

At the beginning all went well but after a while some problems had arisen, and we discovered that it was simply impossible to continue like this. In the middle of the project we had to start all over with a different solution. Because of this the project was delayed resulting in financial losses.

Why the PMs didn't do anything to prevent this? Because he did not have a technical background in the IT domain and was unable to truly understand what the team members were actually doing. He was unable to understand the risk and he had also no idea why the project got delayed.

A PM that does not have good domain expertise and does not deeply understand the technical terminology is unable to ask the team the right questions in order to understand the risks and make appropriate decisions. In fact, he/she makes no technical decisions at all but just agrees with everything the team or the technical leads decide, many times the team does not even bother to explain to him what they are doing at the low level.

A PM with limited or no domain knowledge can be successful only if he/she is lucky to have a team or technical leads that make good technical decisions. If the team makes bad decisions, there is nothing you can do about it and your project would fail even if you performed well in the project management activities that don't require domain knowledge.

In my case if the PM had had good technical background it wouldn’t have been certain that he could have stopped the disaster from happening but at list he could have made a decision on the matter.
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