Who is Project Manager?

Who is project manager? What is his role? What are his primary responsibilities? These are few questions we must answer before move into project manager’s role. In an earlier section “What is Project Management“, I compared a project with a necklace. Functions, team members, stakeholders and technical activities are pearls and project management processes are its thread. Now who is project manager? In this context, project manager is a necklace designer. This is where the art come into picture to give a nice shape to the science. Best pearls and thread are not enough for a necklace to look beautiful. It is the necklace designer’s vision, creativity, hard work and experience that make the necklace looks beautiful. Similarly it is the project manger’s vision, creativity, its decision making skills, its skills of forming cohesive team, its art of engaging stakeholder, its experience in integrating by placing every pearl at an strategic position make project to deliver wonderful results. This art cannot be taught completely in a classroom. Besides classroom we learn it by doing it under an experience artist i.e. an experience project management professional or a guide or a consultant.

Project manager’s primary responsibility is to integrate various aspects of project, technical activities, team and stakeholders. Project manager’s failure to integrate them lead to project failure. A bad project manager can lead a project to failure despite excellent technical resources on board due to his inability to integrate. On the other side, a good project manager can achieve excellent results with average technical resources.

A project manager should have minimum 3 types of competencies – Project Manager Technical Skills, Leadership skills and Strategic Business Management skills to pay his role effectively. We will discuss about these skills in next section.