Project manager

A project manager (hereinafter, the Manager) is literally anyone who manages a project. However, this term often refers to a professional in the field of project management since project management is the responsibility of the Manager.

Nature of work

Alternatively, the Managers can be defined as those who lead development of one or more market exchangeables based on the requirements of project financiers. These financiers can be project sponsors, product owners, buyers, or those who provide the development with finances.

Responsibilities

The Managers have the responsibility of the planning, procurement and execution of a project, in any domain of engineering. Project managers are first point of contact for any issues or discrepancies arising from within the heads of various departments in an organization before the problem escalates to higher authorities.

Products

Those one or more market exchangeables which development the Managers lead include:

• Developed solution which the buyer pays for. The developed solution can be an item or items, service or services, event or events, result or results, or, most commonly, some combination of those;
• Requirements collected from requirement owners. Usually, they include three groups: (a) project financiers, (b) organizational cultures, and (c) enterprise environmental factors including government rules and regulations. The financiers may be those project sponsors, product owners, or buyers directly who provide the development with finances. These requirements can be related to one of two groups:
  1. Requirements related to the products to be developed;
  2. Requirements related to the development itself;
• Plans for:
  1. What the solution is going to be;
  2. How the solution is going to be developed;
• Acquisitions and separations related to:
  1. Those stakeholders who contribute to the requirements;
  2. Those vendors who contribute to the development; and/or
  3. Those staffers who work on the development;
• Knowledge related to the solution and/or its development. This knowledge may include the project data, information, and/or intelligence such as navigating and forecasting;
• If project financiers and/or laws require, accounting documentation related to the solution and/or its development;
• Communications related to the solution and/or its development. Usually, these communications occur between the Manager and project stakeholders.

Definitions

According to the BABOK Guide (3rd edition),

Project manager. A stakeholder who is responsible for managing the work required to deliver a solution that meets a business need, and for ensuring that the project's objectives are met while balancing the project constraints, including scope, budget, schedule, resources, quality, and risk.

Dedications

Project management may be led by the dedicated and/or non-dedicated Managers. The dedicated Managers tend to lead projects with more than one staffer and more predictable scopes rather than the non-dedicated Managers:

• The dedicated Manager rarely participates directly in the activities that produce the end result, but rather strives to maintain the progress, mutual interaction and tasks of various parties in such a way that reduces the risk of overall failure, maximizes benefits, and minimizes costs.
• In Agile projects, the Manager's roles are distributed among staffers because these types of projects are often impossible to predict and, therefore, plan for.

Recommendations for novices

When you are a newbie who is appointed to lead a project, follow these directions:

1. Get prepared to:
   • Observe, listen, watch, and learn. In your capacity, learning is bigger than speaking;
   • Trust, but verify. Be critical, track the sources of your information, and don't be shy to ask even those questions you know the answers for;
   • Research, analyze, compare and contrast. This activity includes reading this very wikipage;
   • Get back over and over again to test credibility, assumptions, prototypes, and, especially, when new data emerges;
   • Document everything significant, not just for yourself, but for those others who are or will be significant parts of the project. In your capacity, documenting is bigger than learning particularly because it allows the others to contribute;
   • Communicate. For instance, the Friends Of CNM uses CNM Wiki for open-to-the-public documentation; and
   • Obtain project financiers' approval before any spending including your work time;
2. Identify the project financiers and all other requirement owners;
3. Collect requirements for:
   • The solution. This type of solution requirements are called functional requirements; and
   • Its development. This type of solution requirements are called non-functional requirements;
4. Design the solution and draft its development;
5. Get your design and drafts approved by the project financiers;
6. Execute the development and submit its results.

Overview

A project manager is the person responsible for accomplishing the project objectives. Key project management responsibilities include

• defining and communicating project objectives that are clear, useful and attainable
• procuring the project requirements like workforce, required information, various agreements and material or technology needed to accomplish project objectives
• managing the constraints of the project management triangle, which are cost, time, scope and quality

See also

Related lectures

• Project Parties and Roles.
• Project Management Quarter.