The Value of a Project Manager’s Perspectives

Success managing projects relies on accurate and timely information, which is needed by both the project manager and the sponsor. Project managers bring unique perspectives that sponsors and other senior stakeholders often lack. Be sure to share these perspectives with the management team, underscoring their role in the project’s success.

• How workload volume affects operational teams. Projects are rarely delivered by team members dedicated to the project. Team members from operational areas serve important roles in most projects. These project assignments can create challenges for operational department managers and their key personnel. Project managers need to understand those challenges and schedule assignments to minimize the impact on the operational team. Project managers can add workload risks to project plans. To achieve the best balance between operational and project work, project managers can communicate the challenges to senior leaders and recommend how to prioritize project and operational work to best serve the business and the project.
• How competing workloads interfere with project progress. Managers often launch projects and operational initiatives without recognizing how those efforts might conflict. Some conflicts stem from pulling a critical project resource to handle operational matters. Senior leaders need to be aware of these resource conflicts and decide on prioritization for the organization’s best interest. Project managers often have the clearest view of these resource prioritization issues and can make recommendations to senior leaders, so project delivery expectations are realistic.
• The state of team morale. Senior leaders typically deal with their management colleagues and high-level customers. Project managers interact with first-level managers and team members. As a result, they have a view of the dynamics and attitudes of the organization’s rank-and-file population that they can share with senior leaders to head off serious morale issues that can hurt project performance.
• Insight into levels of collaboration. Pressures and expectations on departments in an organization can affect the degree of collaboration within a project team. These expectations can come from management direction and sometimes, from perceptions that don’t align with management expectations. Project managers can investigate the source of reduced collaboration and share this with management, who can take action to motivate department members to collaborate more.
• How management can support organizational change. Consider this story: An organization prides itself on its face-to-face interaction with its customers. A project is launched to create an automated self-service model for customers to obtain some services. Reasonable project and objectives. However, the project would challenge a deeply-held element of the organization’s culture, the one-on-one interaction with customers. The senior leaders think all is well, because they communicated the project’s intent. The project manager might perceive that employees wonder whether this is the start of erosion of the organization’s culture of personal interaction with customers. This insight is vital for senior leaders to know. The PM can communicate the insight to the senior leaders. The PM can also suggest that the senior leaders communicate and reassure the team that the organization will continue to embrace a face-to-face culture. This would help ensure that the project is a success, and that the organization embraces the self-service model for customers (if they wish to) to interact with the organization.

Take a moment to think about the projects you’ve managed. Have you ever seen things that the senior leaders missed? How would you present your perceptions now to help executives see their value?

Coming Up

I am busy updating two of my courses. Later in the year, you’ll be seeing new and improved versions of Learning Microsoft Project and Project Management Foundations: Choosing the Right Online Tool. The latter course will review more tools than the original using a different format.

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