Project Managers: Who are they?

My apologies to those people who do the work of a Project Manager but don’t necessarily have the title of Project Manager as I may have unintentionally left you out. In some of my commentaries I refer to a Project Manager (notice the capital letters) but I never actually defined what a Project Manager does or explain that this may be more of an informal role that someone on the project team is playing as opposed to a formal title and list of responsibilities.

In my mind, at least today, as I’m writing this, a Project Manager is a person who guides the team closer to reaching the ultimate goal of creating a working, quality application for a client. This may be something which is being done on a piece meal basis, in which case the Project Manager may be the same person as the developer and designer – a team of one – or it may be something much more complex like a multi-year, multi-phase project where each phase has a Project Manager and the overall implementation has an uber Project Manager called a Programme Manager. In either case the target is the same, although the scope of action may be narrower.

So, why am I bringing this up? I’m reading a book called The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun and it has a number of nuggets of information that I will probably be sharing with you over the course of the next few weeks. I wanted to make sure that we are all on the same page so that tomorrow, when I talk about “Project Managers and Bullies: Are They One and the Same?”, we all know the type of people I am talking about.