Several organizations in our local area are moving away from dedicated project managers. Instead, they are developing project management discipline in existing staff and using the PMO to coach and to provide some standardization. They admit that they initially had an outflow of those who see themselves as career projects managers. However, they feel that the transition has been very successful and have no plans to return to career project managers. For very large projects, a person with project management responsibility may have to fill that role full-time. However, for most projects the dual role seems to work for them. At first, I was shocked as it seemed to suggest that project management skills were regarded as simply another tool in the business person’s tool-kit. However, thinking about it further, many of us fell into project management from some other path to begin with. Your thoughts? Saving Changes...
Wai Mun KooPMO Director| Intergraph PP&MSingapore, Singapore
Interesting question. No doubt that most of us fell into project management from other path. To me, this is just a debate between generalization vs. specialization.
The point here is, no doubt everyone can drives a car, but it takes a lot more to be a professional F1 racer. Saving Changes...
Wai Mun KooPMO Director| Intergraph PP&MSingapore, Singapore
My apology. I should use "most people can drive a car" instead of "everyone can drive a car" in my previous comment. Saving Changes...
Philip HindPM II| P R Hind Consulting LtdRayleigh, Essex, United Kingdom
Rich, You just have to look at Scrum and the non-existence of a Project Manager to know that these "overheads" really aren't required!!!!! The bottom line is that in this day and age where cost savings have to be in order for business to survive, senior management are trying all kinds of weird and wonderful alternatives to the traditional approaches. Some will work, some wont. Lets "suck it and see". Saving Changes...
Josh NankivelEngineering Project Manager| AppleSioux Falls, Sd, United States
"project management skills were regarded as simply another tool in the business person’s tool-kit."
I see nothing to argue with in that statement.
I very much prefer the situation where the project management role is done by someone with technical leadership responsibilities as well, and in fact where the traditional activities of a project manager are more or less distributed across the team.
Lean with Kanban is a great way to facilitate this. The pull system makes for self-organizing teams who decide what to work on when. My role is facilitation, and even before we did Kanban I think 'facilitator' and 'obstacle remover' are the best descriptions for what a good project manager tries to do.
Josh Nankivel
Senior Systems Engineer / Project Manager
Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies
Recent post: You've Got Muda On Your Shoes Saving Changes...
Seems like an effective use of the more experienced, talented project managers so that the lesser experienced project managers can hopefully avoid mistakes and remain productive to the level expected by their firm. Where the rub comes in is when "everyone" can be a project manager regardless of experience or lack of experience.
Let's face it. Tools, processes, and methodologies are just that. They will come and they will go. Bad usage provides IT the equivalent of black eyes and skinned knees but the business folks looking to use your system proabably just had their lives made miserable by your inexperience.
Tools, processes, and methodologies can be learned but working with people, tradeoffs in negotiations, managing expectations, and just plain old common sense should not be left to the energetic, enthusiastic, highly motivated but novice PMs.
Sorry, I just had a flash back to a time where I as a novice PM spoke what I thought was the truth and caused an organization blitz to my management as other areas in the firm sought answers to this new truth I just spouted. It was embarrassing to all involved in my area. After a year I didn't hear any more of it except in jest. Saving Changes...
Ahmad YahyaCEO| ADAM - Agile Digital Assistant for ManagersPutrajaya, Malaysia
I dont see that there will be an end of career PM, atleast not for now. The industry still need these people to delivery projects. What many organization trying to do now is to embed project management culture because the value of project management practice bring to the organization. Having PMO to develop and promote project management, should build the project management capabilities of the organization. But it is by no mean, diminishes the need for PM. Saving Changes...
Wai Mun KooPMO Director| Intergraph PP&MSingapore, Singapore
No doubt that the need for PM expertise is still high in demand. However, whether we will be seeing more generic PMs running projects in different functions or more functional PMs running projects within their function is something specific to corporate culture and industry I would say. Saving Changes...
Elizabeth HarrinDirector| RebelsGuideToPM.comLondon, England, United Kingdom
I have definitely seen the commoditisation of project management, especially amongst some of the tool vendors who are now aiming at a completely different market to MS Project and Primavera users.
The role of the career PM will be in larger, complex projects, like the Olympics, defence, government etc etc. Our skills will be in managing multiple stakeholder groups and organisational politics. In other words, as projects become more complex and more messy, the career PM steps in with advanced project leadership and risk management skills. Anything that just needs a task list, some document templates and some basic team managment could be run by anyone. After all, it's not difficult to be a solid project manager when the projects are straightforward. Saving Changes...
Amro Elakkad PMP M.Sc.Managing Director| Amro Solusi Manajemen (ASM)Nyc, Ny, United States
I don’t think there will ever be an end to traditional and dedicated project managers, here is why. When you take a technical guy and train him to be a project manager, his heart and soul are most likely will always be technical. What that means is that he will always (and probably will do) be tempted to look at the technical specs and documents in a much deeper way than a traditional PM.
What that will do then is this technical guy will lose focus on the big picture, how everything is integrated and how things connect. He will lose focus on steering the project and all that is surrounding it in the right direction.
Think about it like this. If a CEO of a company has an accounting background, he will be very tempted to always look at the books a in a “much deeper” way (i.e. not a 20,000 ft view, rather a very close view). If he does that, he will not have time and will lose focus on the most important aspect of his job: developing and expanding the business.
A PM is like the CEO of the company. If he loses focus on the overall picture, the interdependencies, the integration points, the overall resource picture, etc., he will not have the time to manage the project properly and the project will have a bigger chance of failure.
There is no substitute for a traditional/dedicated project manager.
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Wayne MackRetired| RetiredSouth Riding, Va, United States
I think, at least for IT and software development projects, that this would be a good shift. What these environments need are people with solid technical architecture skills, solid general management skills, and solid requirements gathering skills. Good communications skills are a nice to have, but are not a make or break item.
For IT and software development, leadership staff who can manage the full lifecycle and shift between project work and O&M are critical. Technical knowledge is crucial to planning and change management. Smaller projects may very well require little project management and can be more than adequately handled a good technical lead. Larger projects may require a dedicated person, but some of the key roles include translating business language to technical language and vice-versa, determing technical feasibility and complexity of requirements and change requests, and general leadership.
Especially with the trends to do multiple smaller projects rather than fewer large projects, it becomes hard to justify staff who only do project management. Project management is really a skill set and not a position.
