Responsibilities Of A Good Project Manager

"Importance Of Having A Certified Project Manager  for Complex IT Transformation projects"

Mr. Vivian, CTO of "QFone", a multinational company, approached us to analyze what is going wrong with one of his ambitions IT transformation projects, asking us to recommend how he can still complete the program so that the business benefits can be realized.

Why  Governance & Transparency  is critical for success of a good Project Manager

Here is the description of the project:

Ideation of the program took place in 2005. Orders were placed to an international company "SOX" who is a dominant player in that market segment for 2008. QFone also appointed "CT", a reputed company, as master system integrator for the program.

SOX stopped the project in 2010 due to quick scope creep, yet resumed in 2011 after a long commercial negotiation. In 2013, only 30% of the project was completed, so the project is once again in hot water. There is a scope increase and it currently requires additional funding.

We started our analysis by interviewing Project Managers of "QFone", "CT" an "SOX".

Let's share our findings on their project and program management skills, then we can analyze what went wrong in this key area.

Here is a great video on how to be a great project manager 

1. Professional Certification in Project and Program Management

Today, between 10% and 11% of job postings for Project Managers require, or prefer, a PMP. The reason is because the holder has, or should have, a reasonably normalized vocabulary and should at least be aware of established best practices.

This does not mean, however, that the holder actually knows how to manage a project in the real world, or is a "good" Project Manager.

In this project, none of the Project Mangers are PMP or PRINCE2 certified.

They have technical operations or business analyst backgrounds. They frequently focused more on how to build a legacy requirement in a new system. There was also no proper agreed upon schedule to be tracked or updated regularly. Today's certified project managers must be familiar with online project management tools like Liquidplanner, ZOHO, Teambox, Lighthouse etc.

Lack of  an integrated plan, fails to give early alarm of critical risks with high probability & takes more time in issue resolution. In  a high demanding work, project manager need to focus on vital view rather than trivial many.

2. Alert and Conscious

A project manager must be action-oriented. They must be dynamic enough to turn their decisions into plans. Most of the time a disaster or failure happens, not because of external chaos, but internal confusion. This was a challenge, since the three Project Managers never seemed to align, so they failed to steer the project in the right direction, instead, choosing to escalate each other.

3. Mentor & Mentees

A good Project Manager needs to be mentored and he should be the mentee of the young Project Managers. This is critical to the success of a Project Manager. During an interview, we finally understood that they have a 'boss', but no formal mentors.

4. Relationship

One of the Project Manager's most important roles is to build relationship. Since this team of Project Managers was unable to build good relationships amongst themselves, the three organizations were never able to fully align. For this reason, they failed to do any work collaboratively.

None of the project managers were socially active or mobile enough to be available to the performing teams. The next critical problem was a lack of availability to a unique decision maker. If Project Manager are not decisive and resolute enough, there will often be issues, scope creep or slippage of schedule.

Communication is key responsibility of a PM

There was never any formal agreement about a communication plan, except ad hoc preparation of reports. As a best practice, progress reports should be derived from MS Project Plans. Project Managers need to prepare a sample dash board for the decisions taken, decisions required, top issues, top risks, etc.

In summary, all three Project Managers failed to lead the Team/Manage the Team.

In summary, 6 essential skills of a GOOD Project Manager are:

1. Professional certification in project and program management. Project managers should have great hands on experiences working within ITIL Frameworks apart from formal certification in Prince 2 practitioner certification.
2. They must be an active person, ready to move around and available for the team.
3. Should be skillful enough to work in a demanding situation, yet in the most collaborative way.
4. Must be decisive & resolute in their actions. A good project manager will possess quick sifting abilities, know what to note and what to ignore. They should be able to function easily with horizontal and vertical communication. Project Managers should adhere to predictable communication schedules.
5. Effective delegation is key for success in project management. 
6. Should follow direction set by project governance body or project steering committee.

More than anything, a Project Manger should be a Fantastic, Optimistic, Goal-Oriented leader!

However, project manager is in execution or more preciously operation  level. His job is to get instruction from management level and execute.

The major non conformance happened in Management and Governance layer in setting direction, appointment of project manager, instructing the executing team and bring  alignment  between business and various performing teams.

Next article, we'll discuss how & why project management & program management both failed in this project.

Do you want to know how to use Microsoft Project 13 ?

Visit our project tutorial on Micro Soft Project 13.

Related Articles in our Project Tutorial :

1. Top 10 Best Practices for Making an IT Project Successful

2. Top 7 reasons why large IT projects Fail

Leave comments below on how to become a good project manager and project manager jobs

Author, Mr. Somon is ITIL Master, COBIT 5 & PMP trainer. He is working as consulting program manager at Nirobi, Keyna.  His primary responsibility is to set up COBIT5 for IT governance & ITIL for service operation, service transition.
He successfully roled out Rational Tool or tracking for requirements, managing story boards in current assignment.

 He has been awarded MVP in projects two times by Microsoft.

He worked with companies like Siemens, IBM for 10 years. He is accredited  trainer from APMG & member of ISACA. He conducts face face to project management certification training on PRINCE2  from his Bangalore office.

Disclaimer ; Please consider this article for information only. Any partial or full resemblance with any real life incidence is accidental coincidence. This article purely reflects my personal opinion only.