Can You Make a Project Manager Out of Fairy Dust?
Can You Make a Project Manager Out of Fairy Dust?
Sure, with enough Fairy Dust and some wishful thinking, anyone can make a Worldclass Software Engineer or a Pipefitter, or a Chemical Engineer out of Fairy Dust too, right? You Can't? Then why are Project Managers different?
We all know I am simply making a point here and that is that the role of PM is often minimized in the minds of those contemplating the notion. For some reason, when some people think of a Project manager, they think of someone that simply manages a task list in a scheduling tool, or someone we only see when we've overrun our budget.
This in itself has been the cause of many project failures.
Drive-By PM'ing
The role of Project Manager is often bestowed upon an unwitting and untrained member of a team (I call this a drive-by PM'ing) such as a Software Engineer, Business Analyst, or Requirements Engineer.All too often, a decision maker considers Project Management as a discipline and decides to make one of his/her Superstar Engineers responsible for the Project Management activities on a project. This is perilous because the scope of proper Project Management has been underestimated from the starting-line and the project will suffer two (or even three) fold due to the geometric equation of taking your top resource and time-slicing with them.
There are a plethora of afflictions associated with this problem that can be discussed in a later post.Recognize
Not to say that a Business Analyst or a Software Engineer cannot make excellent Project Managers. It will require training, it will require time, and to be good at it, it will require experience. Not at all unlike the way in which the same Business Analyst or Software Engineer came upon their current skillset. Recognizing that PM skills are necessary is a huge step but what we need to do from there is educate ourselves and those around us about what Project Management is and what it isn't. Making sure people have broken free from the ideas that Project Management skills simply slow us down or prevent us from making progress is a good start. Project Managers are here for project success and no other reason, lest we forget.
In ClosingThere are many resources available for those wishing to make a leap into Project Management but it is best to think of PM skills as a broad portfolio of skills, most of which are somewhat counter-intuitive, and most of which are softer in nature and are difficult to teach and learn. I suggest formal academic training combined with real-world project work as a good combination for knowledge retention and true learning.
If you could use Fairy Dust to make Project Managers, then you could probaby use it to fix broken projects too.
Jason Becker, PMP, CPM