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The Three Weapons of a Project Manager

March 22, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Musings

The Three Weapons of a Project Manager
By Rob Redmond

Every project manager has three weapons in their arsenal that they can reach for when they feel that their own personal charm and logic are not getting the job done.

Know your weapons and understand how and when to apply them. Your projects will deliver on time and under budget.

Project Management can be a frustrating job. Essentially any PM is a manager without formal authority over their teams. They generally do not perform annual reviews, do not hire, and cannot fire team members. Many companies hire people in as contractors to work as PMs, and this leaves the typical PM with even less social status than they would have if they were an actual employee of the company in which they are working. A PM has to be more clever when they are having trouble getting what they need from a team member.

Project Managers have three main weapons that they can reach for when they are in conflict with their teams and are not getting the participation they need for success:

Meetings. Project Managers are able to schedule and summon people to meetings. Holding a weekly project meeting to review schedule, scope, cost, and status is standard operating procedure. Project Managers also have the ability to set up a meeting for later that afternoon or the next day and invite people who are not normally participants in the project. Many technical types despise meetings, and as such, often the threat of calling a meeting to discuss a sticking point will generate results just to prevent the meeting from happening. If the meeting does happen, the project manager can use the meeting as a ceremony to reaffirm their authority over those who are indirectly reporting to them for the project by asking each person to report in their status and asking probing questions about the reasons for being tardy.

Status Reporting. A skilled PM also knows that when people don’t show up for meetings, stop responding to phone calls and voice mail, that directly confronting the individual is difficult in remote situations. In such a case, status reporting is another tool that a PM has at their disposal. Constructing a status report in email which states very clearly that the project is in trouble and the person in particular who is holding things up can cause a lot of pressure to be brought upon the person who has been unresponsive thus far.

Escalation. The act of placing phone calls to team members’ bosses, and their bosses, and their bosses until you get someone who will respond to you and make those below them understand their responsibilities is known as escalation. It is called that because you bring the conflict from your level up to higher and higher levels. Often an unresponsive team member will think the project is a low priority until his boss hears from the Vice President that the project is now his top priority.

Project Managers must use these weapons with sparingly and professionally in order to get what they want without becoming shrill and overly noisy. However, with clear communication, which is all these three so-called “weapons” are, often misunderstandings about what is expected and how badly the project is suffering are removed and things start happening quickly.

Rob Redmond studied sociology, psychology, and political science as an undergraduate before entering the workforce. Returning to school, Redmond earned an MBA from Georgia State University in June of 2000. Rob is currently employed as a manager of IT of a large technology company. Rob runs the struggling manager blog where he posts about his experience in both management and project management.

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