What makes a good Project Manager: Specialist Skills or Generalist Knowledge?

Recently, I met one of my professional connections for lunch. Bob works for a large Fortune 500 firm. Over lunch he told me his sob story…. he just got passed over for a role despite having the right credentials. His firm is rolling out a CRM tool and they are looking for a Program Manager to lead this regionally. The job-spec read PMP certified, good project management skills, excellent stakeholder management skills and strong communications. Bob checks all the boxes. However when he applied for the job, Bob was turned down summarily without even being given a chance to interview. They told him that they cannot consider him because he does not have experience in the CRM tool “SILVER BULLET” that the firm is trying to roll out. Bob did try to put up a case saying that he had experience in another tool “MIDAS TOUCH” which is a competing product to “SILVER BULLET”. Moreover, the job is not about technical expertise, instead it is about program management.Needless to say, his arguments fell on deaf ears. Bob is a very strong project management practitioner and he has had a stellar performance record with the firm since he joined them as a contractor 3 years back. In fact, they offered to convert him to a permanent position within 3 months. Bob is quite non controversial and has consciously kept away from company politics, so any other reasons for his rejection can be safely ruled out. 

PMI, the mothership of most project managers, seems to suggest that a healthcare project manager could in principle execute construction projects and vice versa as long as they are following a prescribed framework for managing a project. In his interesting article in the corp magazine titled “PM vs. SME: The Great Management Debate”, Mark Philips elucidates this point nicely : 

Does each industry have its own unique tool set? Is any industry so specialized that it precludes a skilled practitioner of multidisciplinary management from success? Looking over the annals of business and project management, I contend an effective manager, an effective executive, can succeed in any industry. Management science and its project management sub-category draw from more than a century of data, case studies and best practices to prepare individuals to lead businesses. 

Unfortunately, contrary to what the annals of project management would have us believe, our industry seems to be flooded with mediocre managers and very few of them seem to appreciate the fact that project management is less about subject matter expertise and more about leadership, process focus and change management. Of course, there is a science in scope management, schedule management and risk management, but there is also a dark art which involves change management, leadership, stakeholder management,motivating cross functional teams and becoming a “knowledge broker” rather than a “knowledge expert”. Personally, I have always found it better to to hire the right “project management” attitude rather than subject matter skills….. subject matter expertise can always be picked up on the job.

It reminds me of a situation many years back when I was starting my career with a large manufacturer in South Asia . Over the last 5 years, they had migrated their resource planning system from mainframes to a client server environmen. Their technology department had built an impressive repertoire of in house applications to enable their entire value chain from sales to manufacturing to delivery. ERP was the new buzz word in those days and the CIO (lets call him Asok) wanted to get that next. We had recently joined the firm as management associates. Some of us who were hired for the Technology department expressed our interest to work in the ERP rollout project team. But the CIO was a old school guy, he would have none of that. He said “I will only put people with 8 – 10 years of subject matter experience on the ERP project” Asok had at his disposal some of the brightest minds from the best b-schools in the country waiting to be utilised, but he ignored them and put the old hands on the project. He did not consider one thing though, these old hands were reluctant to change. They were full of intellectual arrogance having run the production line for a few years and thought they knew everything. And they were very closed to new ideas. Asok then hired a consulting firm to manage the project professionally.

Fast forward 12 months. The firm realised that the project was a failure. The consultant after billing millions of dollars put up their hands and said your systems are too complex, we can try to simplify them but your old hands do not want to change the way they work! We are sorry , but you are better off with your old system. This is a good example of how so called “subject matter expertise” can sometimes be the real bane of change management.

Here is how my story ends: Asok stopped coming to work one fine morning without any word. He had mysteriously left his company car parked in the company parking lot with the keys inside. No-one had a clue where he was. The ERP vendor and the consultant had their contracts terminated within a month. Fast forward a couple of years, I had moved on and I was in the east coast working on an international assignment for another firm. And there I found Asok. The ERP vendor had managed to find him a job somewhere, but, gone was his corner office and his 150 strong team.

Back home, Bob is now actively calling the recruiters. And the hiring manager who refused his application is sitting smug in his glass office probably using pages from the PMBOK to wipe coffee spills off his table!

(I have changed Asok and Bob’s real names in order to protect their identity. This piece is written with the intention of sharing best practices in project management and does not aim to criticise the management practices of any organisation. The views expressed are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my current employer or any of the firms that I may have worked for in the past.)