I am new to the role of Project Manager, and am working to develop ?standard? PM Practices within my Department. The question arose as to which projects warrant a full-time PM? I have some ideas on this ? in theory, but would really appreciate any practical / real-life input I could get on this. Should it be based on certain quantifiers such as money/budget, head-count, project life-span (i.e. time)? And if so, what are the values of those quantifiers?
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Anonymous
A few criteria that definitely need to be considered are the following: - complexity (how complex is the project both technically and politically?) - cross departmental or operating company (how many people need to be involved - I've worked on projects accross several operating companies - it was a full-time job) - how many executive sponsors do you have to manage? - how large is the team? This is a tough one - I don't think it comes down to a formula. A project manager does what they need to do to get the project done. That said, you have to consider the costs of course. You wouldn't spend $1000 to save $100 right?
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Mike Cooper PMPPrincipal Project Manager (retired, sort of)| New England Project ServicesWestford, Ma, United States
A rough rule of thumb I had when working for a major IT services company was that if we had 10 people full-time on a project, we needed a full-time project manager. Generally project management activities (those of the PM and leadership activities of team leaders) would typically consume between 10% - 15% of the overall project effort. Saving Changes...
Andrew CotterellTransformation Manager| World Intellectual Property OrganisationGeneva, Switzerland
I also use the "10 people rule" as a rough guideline but I would include people who are not full-time on the project, e.g. stakeholders, since they need a fair amount of managing too. If you have a team of twenty, the project management effort may be doubled but you can't have 2 project managers, so the extra effort is delegated to Team Leaders. Saving Changes...
