Project Management_Why Such Things Happen?

Many of you probably handling various projects presently. it could be your work projects or personal (some called it Pet) projects. here i would like to focus on projects that you do at work. Now we have a Project Manager (PM) role (as a professional job) to manage projects in the company. generally PM is around in IT-based company or if your company has an extensive IT initiatives. This PM can either be employed directly by your company or provided by your IT solutions company on project basis.

But what is the exact role of PM? I have met numerous PM from various backgrounds and in various projects. Rarely i found that really have solid big picture on the project. often times PM either choose to be the champion for their own team rather than the client. i found that is depressing and delusional. Let me tell you why and some of my experiences.

I was at one time in a project team for a national IT initiative. The goal is “let people know us globally and come to do business with us”. My team is the solutions vendor and we are working (partnering supposedly) with a brand team that handles all the Above the line and Below the line. My team role is solely on the technology solutions and online marketing.

My PM decided throughout the project to back my own team and take lightly communication with other team members and partners. We faced severe communication breakdown because information flow, there was some potholes where some people know some information and some totally oblivious on what’s happening around them. The technical team also very confuse and lots of time we have to face the client apologetically because we fail to meet certain expectations.

In my another project, which is dealing with a large conglomerate to do an e-commerce portal. My PM decided to focus on himself whereby he only concerns about his timeline and documentation. he decided not to be assertive with the client and other project team members. as a result, we have a lot of delayed deliverables and my PM don’t really rush the client to make decisions. As a result, client think we were late and we on the other hand feels the client were the one that was late. When we check with the PM, “yeah, we all late!!”. That was a joke to me.

My another project where i deal with a PM that only cares about her work. She micro-manage everyone to some extend that i found unnecessary. She also refuse to share documents to support her claims in certain items that she aforementioned deemed late or delayed. She also boss around where many of my team members are overly worried to ask her and present to her some project problems.

So, what exactly project management that would be best? To my opinion, there is no single solution for this ; no silver bullet! The fact that my all my PMs done that way simply because based on their understanding of the projects, that should be the best way to handle the situations.

But one thing as my focus that always works well and able to make both clients and my team happy is to focus on the customers needs. Let say the customers require more features to be done , as PM we need to escalate this to the team and discuss how we can perform this task in given time or less. It’s alll about speed, speed and speed. Customers these days want things to be done speedier, free and unique services. So we face a lot of challenges. Not to mention out of scope requirements where sometime would require additional resources to be deployed i.e. new $$$ is needed!

What’s your take on project management based on your experience and observations? Share it out! Cheers!