Have you ever seen the dismissal of a project manager?

Luis -

I have seen this. The most common root-causes have been as follows:
- Excellent soft-skills, promoted to incompetence due to not understanding the big picture or project
- Terrible leadership skills, loses the trust of the team
- Inability to inform and communicate risks, issues, and the headlines without misleading accuracy of health
status and contingency

Mikel

I would also like to add that many PMs lack domain knowledge and as such they don't really understand what the team members are doing.

If you don't have good domain knowledge you can't really lead a team as you don't have the knowledge to give direction and work related instructions to the team members. In such cases it is not fair to dismiss a PM for his inability to lead the team since you appointed him without having domain knowledge.

I can give a better example on why a PM should be removed. In a software development project the team did a great job and delivered what the customer wanted but the company that delivered the project suffered a major loss Why? Because the PM did not monitor the requests the customer had made and did not raised change requests for them. The developers did not care an delivered what the customer had asked even if most of the work was off scope.

Many PMs are obsessed with leading the team but in reality they don't lead the team but just track, report and raise issues and escalate as needed. These PMs don't lead teams because they lack domain knowledge.

In my opinion the evaluation of a PM should not be centered on leading the team but more on things such as managing the scope, tracking, reporting, raising issues, facilitating the decision making process at all levels (not just at the team level), etc.

The fact that the team does not deliver does not necessarily mean that the PM is incompetent. Maybe the team members are incompetent and the PM can't replace them. Or the expectations the stakeholders have are unreasonable.

As a PM with only a few years experience, I had to dismiss a team member who was trying to be a PM as well, instead of doing the job they were assigned.

I was leading a set of sub-teams developing technical technical training for new engineering software. The problem individual was supposed to support but was instead trying to manage the individual sub-teams themselves. They were completely incompetent, it was very disruptive to everyone else, and they were all coming to me asking for help.

I asked the disruptive member to help work with me personally coordinating all the teams, but they insisted that they had to lead and couldn't help me do my boring job. After a discussion with both my own manager and theirs, I was instructed that if they would not follow my directions I had to tell them to return back to their home office across town. That is normally a job for the functional manager.

After another attempt to try and get them to play nicely with the others by getting the teams together and clarifying roles, the individual revolted in front of everyone, and I was forced to take them aside and tell them to return.

In retrospect, trying to clarify roles in a group setting so as not to single anyone out had the complete opposite affect I hoped for, but I had no training in this sort of thing. It was an extremely unpleasant situation all around.

Luis -

This is unfortunately something I've seen more than once - sometimes it IS a question of incompetent project management, other times incompetent leadership from above the PM who was let go.

Kiron

Dear Kiron
Thank you for sharing your opinion
For technical incompetence and / or leadership, is that it?