Other Important Project Management Roles

May 1, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Role of the Project Manager

Other Important Project Management Roles (#5 in the series The Key Integrative Roles in Project Management)
By Dr.Russell Archibald

Other important roles relating to projects also exist, including:

Project customer: the person or organization that will receive the benefits from the results of the project. For projects under contract, the customer usually pays for and authorizes the project when the contract is signed. For in-house projects there may be several customers.

Project champion: the person who promotes and keeps the project alive, who may or may not be the general manager.

Owner of the results of the project: this person or organization may or may not be the project customer.

User or operator of the project results: this person or organization may or may not be the project owner.

While all of these additional roles are important, they do not carry the same level of integrative responsibility as the key roles listed above.

However, if the project customer organization is a major contributor to the project, performing important tasks on which project completion is dependent, then there is a need to identify the integrative roles listed above within the customer’s organization as well. The same can be said for all outside organizations that contribute significantly to the project in question.

Dr. Russell D. Archibald, PhD (Hon), MSc, Fellow PMI and APM/IPMA, PMP, is one of the six founding members of the Project Management Institute. Now semi-retired, he has many years of management experience in engineering and operations with a variety of major US corporations in Europe and South America as well as the US. He has made major contributions to the understanding of project management, is author of the best selling 2003 book “Managing High-Technology Programs and Projects” (published also in Russian, Chinese, and Italian), has trained more than a thousand program and project managers and project specialists around the world, and has consulted in project management to clients in 14 countries on 4 continents. E-mail: russell_archibald@yahoo.com. Website: www.russarchibald.com.

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