The Big Trap—Working Project Managers

It is common to have individuals serve as project managers and require that they do part of the actual work in the project. This is a certain prescription for problems. If it is a true team, consisting of several people, the project manager will inevitably find herself torn between managing and getting her part of the work done. Naturally, the work must take precedence, or the schedule will slip, so she opts to do the work. That means that the managing will not get done. She hopes it will take care of itself, but it never does. After all, if the team could manage itself, there would be no need for a project manager in the first place (remember our argument above about whether project management matters?).

Unfortunately, when time comes for her performance evaluation, she will be told that her managing needs improving. Actually, she just needs to be allowed to practice management in the first place.

Yes, for very small teams—perhaps up to three or four people—a project manager can do some of the work. But as team sizes increase, it becomes impossible to work and manage both, because you are constantly being pulled away from the work by the needs of your team members.

One of the reasons for this situation is that organizations don’t fully understand what project management is all about, and they think that it is possible for individuals to do both. The result is that nearly everyone in the company is trying to manage projects, and as is true in every discipline, some of them will be good at it and others will have no aptitude whatsoever. I have found that a far better approach is to select a few individuals who have the aptitude and desire to be project managers and let them manage a number of small projects. This frees “technical” people (to use the term broadly) to do technical work without having to worry about administrative issues, and allows project managers to get really good at their jobs.

It is outside the scope of this book to discuss how to select project managers, but for the interested reader, the topic is covered in a book entitled The World-Class Project Manager (Wysocki & Lewis, 2001).