13-Dec-20

The Project Manager

Md. Hasan Ali
Lecturer
Department of Industrial and Production Engineering
Bangladesh army university of science and technology

Functions of Project Manager

1. Developing a unique product or process and manage change.
2. Identification of the need for project.
3. Finding different alternatives of the project.
4. Developing a plan of action.
5. Training operators.
6. Establishment of quality assurance cell to control quality.
7. Incorporation of changes as and when needed while implementing project.
8. Selection of suitable equipment.
9. Finding suitable financial resources.
10. Assessment of alternatives and obtaining approval to proceed.
11. Measuring performance of the project.
12. Transfer of material, funds and settling all accounts after completion of project.
13. Monitoring progress and reporting to higher authorities.
14. Closing all records, submission of final report and transfer of responsibility after
completion of specified project.

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Selection of a Project Manager

The selection of project manager depends on following points:
Problem Solving Skills
1. Does this person have a history of being able to solve complex problems?
2. Does this person have the attitude that a problem is an opportunity to learn?
Personal Leadership Style
1. Does this person have the communications and people skills appropriate for
the mix of people who will be required on this project?
2. Will this person encourage project team members to bring up problems rather
than play the blame game?
3. Does this person have excellent time management skills?

Selection of a Project Manager

Organizational Experience
1. Does this person know how work gets done in this organization?
2. Is this person experienced in working in similar organizations and is that
experience transferable to this project?
3. Does this person know the politics of our organization and have the savvy to
navigate these situations?
Skills and Knowledge
1. Does this person have adequate knowledge about the subject of this project?
2. If some of these skills are weak is there support available in the organization
to offset the problem?
3. Does this person have adequate technical skills for this project?
4. Does this person have the skills understand the root causes of potential
problems and keep them from reoccurring?

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Selection of a Project Manager

• Project Management Experience
1. Has this person led projects of similar scope, size, length, and
priority?
2. Is this person on a growth track to lead more complex
projects?

Selection of a Project Manager

Four major categories of skills that are required for the project manager and
serve as the key criteria for selection:
• Credibility
• Sensitivity
• Leadership and management style
• Ability to handle stress

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Credibility

The project manager needs two kinds of credibility:

Technical credibility - perceived by the client, senior executives, the
functional departments, and the project team as possessing sufficient
technical knowledge to direct the project.
Administrative credibility - keeping the project on schedule and within costs
and making sure reports are accurate and timely. Must also make sure the
project team has material, equipment, and labor when needed.

Sensitivity

There are several ways for project managers to display sensitivity:

Understanding the organization’s political structure.
Sense interpersonal conflict on the project team or between team members
and outsiders.
Does not avoid conflict, but confronts it and deals with it before it escalates .
Keeps team members “cool”.
Sensitive set of technical sensors - ability to sense when team members may
try to “sweep things under the rug”.

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Leadership and Management Style

Leadership has been defined as:

“interpersonal influence, exercised in situation and directed through the
communication process, toward the attainment of a specified goal or goals.”
Other attributes may include:
enthusiasm
optimism
energetic
tenacity
courage
personal maturity

Ability to Handle Stress

Four major causes of stress associated with the management of projects:

1. Never developing a consistent set of procedures and techniques with which
to manage their work.
2. Many project managers have “too much on their plates”.
3. Some project managers have a high need to achieve that is consistently
frustrated.
4. The parent organization is in the middle of major change.

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Functional Manager and Project Manager

The functional manager uses the analytic approach and the PM uses the
systems approach.
Functional managers manage people while project managers manage processes
without having any formal authority over people.
Functional managers usually manage budgets and resources while project
managers don’t manage their own resources but instead they work with the
resources managed by the functional managers.
Functional managers are part of the management team of the organization
while most project managers despite their job title are ordinary employees and
not real managers.

Functional Manager and Project Manager

Functional managers have direct reports, project managers usually don’t. As

such FMs can hire and fire employees, do performance reviews, raise
salaries, award bonuses, promote or demote people. PMs don’t have the
power to do these things.
FMs are responsible for the work of their direct reports in all circumstances
even when the employees are working on projects, PMs on the other hand
are responsible for the so called operational aspects of a project which
usually don’t involve the actual work performed
In some industries such as IT is possible to start you career as an entry level
PM , while FMs are always senior positions that require some work
experience before acceding to such a role.

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Functional Manager and Project Manager

Project Management and the Project Manager

Three major questions face the project manager:

1. What needs to be done?
2. When must it be done?
3. How are the resources required to do this job going to be obtained?
Project manager is responsible for organizing, staffing, budgeting, directing,
planning, and controlling the project.

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Responsibilities of a Project Manager

Responsibility to the Parent Organization.

Responsibility to the Client.
Responsibility to the Team Members.
Above all, the Project Manager must never allow senior management to be
surprised.

Responsibilities to the Parent Organization

Conservation of resources.
Timely and accurate project communications.
Careful, competent management of the project.
Protect the firm from high risk.
Accurate reporting of project status with regard to budget and schedule.

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Responsibility to the Client

Preserve integrity of project and client.

Resolve conflict among interested parties.
Ensure performance, budgets, and deadlines are met.

Responsibility to project team members

Fairness, respect, honesty.
Concern for members’ future after project.

Project Management Career Paths

Most Project Managers get their training in one or more of three ways:
On-the-job
Project management seminars and workshops
Active participation in the programs of the local chapters of the Project
Management Institute
Formal education in degreed programs

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Importance of Project Management Experience

Experience as a project manager serves to teach the importance of:
An organized plan for reaching an objective
Negotiation with one’s co-workers
Follow through
Sensitivity to the political realities of organizational life
The career path often starts with participation in small projects, and later in
larger projects, until the person is given control over small, then larger
projects

Special Demands on the Project Manager

A number of demands are critical to the management of projects:

Acquiring adequate resources
Acquiring and motivating personnel
Dealing with obstacles
Making project goal trade offs
Dealing with failure and the risk and fear of failure
Maintaining breadth of communication
Negotiation

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Acquiring adequate resources

Resources initially budgeted for projects are frequently insufficient

Sometimes resource trade-offs are required
Subcontracting is an option
Project and functional managers perceive availability of resources to be
strictly limited
Competition for resources often turns into “win-lose” propositions
between project and functional managers

Acquiring and Motivating Personnel

A major problem for the project manager is that most people required for a
project must be “borrowed”
At times, functional managers may become jealous if they perceive a
project as more glamorous than their own functional area.
Typically, the functional manager retains control of personnel evaluation,
salary, and promotion for those people lent out to projects.
Because the functional manager controls pay and promotion, the project
manager cannot promise much beyond the challenge of the work itself.
• Characteristics of effective team members:
• High quality technical skills
• Political sensitivity
• Strong problem orientation
• Strong goal orientation
• High self-esteem

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Dealing with Obstacles

One characteristic of any project is its uniqueness and with that come a series
of crises:
As a project nears completion, obstacles tend to be clustered around two
issues:
1. Last minute schedule and technical changes.
2. Uncertainty surrounding what happens to members of the project team
when the project is completed.

Making Project Goal Trade-offs

The project manager must make trade offs between the project goals of cost,
time and performance:
During the design or formation stage of the project life cycle, there is no
significant difference in the importance project managers place on the three
goals.
Schedule is the primary goal during the build up stage, being more
important than performance, which is in turn significantly more important
than cost.
During the final stage, phaseout, performance is significantly more
important than cost.

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Failure and the Risk of Fear and Failure

It is difficult, at times, to distinguish between project failure, partial failure,

and success. Two general types of projects:
Type 1 - these projects are generally well-understood, routine construction
projects.
• Appear simple at the beginning of the project.
• Rarely fail because they are late or over budget, though commonly
are both.
• They fail because they are not organized to handle unexpected crises
and deviations from the plan.
Type 2 - these are not well understood, and there may be considerable
uncertainty about specifically what must be done.
• Many difficulties early in the life of the project.
• Often considered planning problems.
• Most of these problems result from a failure to define the mission
carefully.

Breadth of Communication

To effectively deal with the demands, a project manager must understand and
deal with certain fundamental issues:
• Must understand why the project exists.
• Critical to have the support of top management.
• Build and maintain a solid information network.
• Must be flexible in many ways, with as many people, and about as many
activities as possible throughout the life of the project.

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