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 products 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 products 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.

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. Identify the requirement owners;
2. Collect requirements for the solution and its development;
3. Design the solution and draft its development;
4. Communicate your design and drafts with the project financier in order to get it approved;
5. 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

Related lectures

• Project Management Quarter.