What is project management? And what does a project manager do?

What is project management? And what does a project manager do? (by Toufic El Khoury)

If you were to look up the role of a project manager, you would find some vague, if not utterly confusing description of the role and what project management is.

It is super difficult to describe what a project manager does without repeating the word project so many times that it gets permanently imprinted in the reader’s mind, and without going over all areas covered by project management. Any other description that does not, leaves a lot to be interpreted and imagined.

Let’s take for example, the project manager’s description as given by the PMI (Project Management Institute):

“They are organized, passionate and goal-oriented [individuals] who understand what projects have in common, and their strategic role in how organizations succeed, learn and change.” – PMI?

That doesn’t help does it? Not if the reader is not an experienced project manager which, to be fair to PMI, they expect as a prerequisite for starting most of their certifications.

In short, and from experience, project managers are people who lead teams, regardless of the selected project management framework, to work on well-defined sets of requirements with the goal of completing this work on time, on budget and to the satisfaction of all involved stakeholders. A project then, should be delivering a product, procedure or a service that falls within the initiative detailed by the set of requirements and that aligns to the vision of the institutions and stakeholders engaged within this project.

“Project Management is like juggling three balls, time, cost and quality.” – Geoff Reiss (project management pioneer).

Time, scope, cost and quality are the three (yeap three not a typo) pillars of project management. Managing these pillars and ensuring they are kept within the baseline (agreed initial state) is what makes a project a success and this is what the project manager should focus on.

All three pillars (again with the three) of project management are equally important but are they though!! In theory, they are, since they are the sides of a triangle with quality being a circle inserted inside the triangle, they should be equally important, especially that any change to either of them is going to affect all other aspects. However, from experience and while working on projects from different industries it always feels like time is the most important of the pillars. Getting a project on time, and maybe ahead of time in most cases is beneficial to the initiatives and visions set by institutions and stakeholders that require the project and that, most of the time, is more beneficial than being too stringent on cost.

“Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed” – Peter Drucker (Management consultant, educator and author).

Getting there? Maybe!! Let’s continue then and go back to PMI and the famous Rita Mulcahy’s PMP exam prep book, which feels like it got bigger than the PMI PMBOK which it summarizes, and to the integration management chapter, yes you read it right INTEGRATION. What does integration have to do with project management? well integration management might be the most important aspect of project management; after all, the book summarizes the project manager’s role as an?integrator.?While the work of the project is being done, the team members are concentrating on completing the work packages, the project sponsor should be protecting the project from changes and loss of resources and the project manager is responsible for integration, putting all the pieces of the project into one cohesive whole.

“if you were asked, What is a project manager’s main role? What would you say? The answer is to perform integration management – to pull all the pieces of a project together into a cohesive whole. This is so much a part of a project manager’s job that it is arguably the reason for the project manager’s existence in an organization and on a project” – PMP Exam Prep book.