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Thank you for your message Edward.
From my experience, I have seen that in the IT domain project management has become to a large degree some sort of profession on its own right. There are people that are starting their career as entry level project managers while many others manage projects without being able to do the work of the project team members.
In the above situations, it is simply impossible for the PM to tell the team members how to do their jobs, when he/she is not from the same line of work as they are. It is like someone that hasn’t practiced or studied medicine tells a surgeon how to perform an operation.
It is important to make the distinction between asking someone to perform a task by defining what needs to be delivered (in user’s terms) and giving instructions (in technical terms) about what exactly needs to be done to complete the task.
When you are “managed” by someone that is unable to do your work, you don’t feel the same pressure as you would feel if your manager was from the same line of work as you are. In the first case, you have the freedom to do whatever you think it is right to complete the task while in the second case you must obey the instructions given to you by your manager and as such you have no freedom.
This pressure, in my opinion, is the negative side of micromanagement but in some cases, for instance when the team members are inexperienced, you must micromanage. The problem is you can only micromanage in this way if you are a better worker than those you manage.
Not giving concrete work instructions to workers but asking them each day or even many times a day about the progress could also create a negative impact on the team members but in my opinion it is not as bad as giving them concrete work instructions.
Now regarding the PMs authority, from what I’ve seen in IT, it is generally low to non-existing. The main reason for this situation is the fact that the project is a temporary structure from within an organization that doesn’t have its own resources but instead uses resources who are owned and managed by someone else (not the PM).
The fact that the PM is not also a very experienced SME, in my opinion, is another important factor that affects in a negative way his authority. An author wrote in a book about project management that when the PM is not also an experienced technical expert then he can only work in a weak matrix environment and the team members would not seek guidance from him/her but from their functional manager.
So many, if not most PMs (at least in IT) don’t manage “down” as they have no subordinates but they must manage laterally even their project team members as they are (from an organizational point of view) peers and not subordinates.
