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The Project Management Gene

January 22, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Agile Project Management, Project Management Best Practices, Project Management Musings

The Project Management Gene
By Melanie Carasso

There are five factors you’ll see in people who exhibit “the project management gene”:

  1. They have technical smarts
  2. They are blessed with above-average emotional intelligence
  3. They have good planning & execution skills
  4. They are able to adapt to changing circumstances quickly
  5. They seek feedback on their own performance and continually try to improve

Technical smarts - I don’t think you need to have current technical expertise across every facet of the codebase you manage, but in most companies you need to understand all the concepts of software development to be able to guide the team through the estimation process and help them identify technical risks and issues.

Emotional intelligence - whether you have a large, permanent team of direct reports, or your team members are loaned to you by a functional manager, or you’re managing a distributed team, or you’re working with contractors, you need to be scoring pretty high on the EQ scale to create a high performance team. I’ve known plenty of tech-savvy project managers who had very little awareness of their own interpersonal style, and/or weren’t able to understand and facilitate the interrelations of their team members. If you can’t do these things well, the project will very likely get ugly quickly and your team members will want out.

Planning & execution skills - not a lot of explanation needed here. It’s perhaps the most fundamental part of the project management gene, but I don’t think it’s sufficient on its own.

Adaptability - this is clearly necessary in any agile dev role, but if the project manager can’t adapt quickly, the team will either quickly outrun him/her or - worse - continue on its initial trajectory and miss the opportunity to optimise the project outcomes. Being agile and adaptive is contrary to classical project management training (where we are taught to define the project scope, stick to it as much as possible, and - if it is really unavoidable - deal with scope change by wielding our intimidating powers of change control process with great force). This is the area where I think having no project management training can be a distinct advantage.

Seeking feedback & improving - this is a common trait in anyone who is good at their job, in any field. It’s a cornerstone of agile methodologies.

So what do you think… are these the factors that make up the agile project management gene, or have I got it wrong?

Melanie Carasso is the program manager at Atlassian, an Australian software company that develops collaboration and development tools including JIRA and Confluence. Melanie has been managing software projects and programs for the past 8 years in various regions of the waterfall-agile spectrum, at telecommunications, medical management and industrial automation companies. Before diving into software project management, Melanie worked as a research scientist in microelectronics and fiber optics at Bell Labs and IBM in the US. She holds a PhD in chemistry from the University of Sydney and is PMP certified. In her blog, The Agile Program Manager, she shares her thoughts on managing programs in an agile way.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 and is filed under Agile Project Management, Project Management Best Practices, Project Management Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 people have left comments

I concur with all you’ve said. This is a good summary of attributes that contribute to one being a good project management. Though, all of the attributes you mentioned can be learned, hence not genetic. I am a nurture guy, ;)

Bronson wrote on January 30, 2010 - 12:24 am | Visit Link

Agree with Bronson - all these can be learned, even if some find it easier to than others.

Onlooker wrote on April 2, 2010 - 6:12 am | Visit Link

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