What Is Expected of a Project Manager?

This is what I expect from my project managers.

1. Know your customer.

• understand what they want
• understand why they want it (so you can make intelligent decisions)
  
  Remember that you have both internal and external customers. The internal customer is the person or department inside your organization that you are doing this for. This could be your direct manager, or it could be someone from another department. The external customer is whoever is paying the company for your services. The primary customer is the one funding the effort. Because specifications are always open to interpretation, you must know why the customer wants this to help you make the right decisions.

2. Talk to your customers. There should be regular reports to the customer about what is going on.

• Schedule
• Budget
• Resource Plan
• Risks and Mitigation Plan
  
  Make sure both the internal customers and the external customers are getting the message. Too often project managers stay silent about project slips or budget overruns in hopes of recovering later. The earlier you highlight these things the more help you will get to recover. I know delivering bad news is painful, but if you regularly don’t deliver bad news until the eleventh hour then I don’t want you on my project management team.

3. Drive completion of the task

• Drive the schedule – not just report it
• Secure the budget – if the budget is insufficient, scream for more
• Secure the resources – if the resources are insufficient, scream for more
• Manage the risks – discover them early and communicate them

  Never say you could not do something because of fiscal constraints if you did not first go asking for more money for that particular task. Never say you could not do something because of resource constraints if you did not first go asking for more resources for that particular task. In general asking once is not enough. Senior management have thick heads, you need to be persistent or we don’t believe your complaint is real.

That’s it.