Blog of Wade Making Connexions

What Makes ‘the Good’ Project Manager

Communication and Expression are characteristics of Humans, and playing my part as a Human, I try communicating and expressing myself as clearly as possible. I mentally analyze my experiences in realtime with others, and try reverse engineer their personality to best determine how to communicate with them. I try see the whole, whilst also seeing the many parts that make up the whole. This is something I try do with everyone to allow myself to have the most real communication as possible.

In the last year I’ve had direct contact with between 40-60 Project Managers. This has allowed me to determine a baseline between Role and Person. My Role Analysis results to the difference between The Good Project Manager and The Bad Project Manager. I understand ‘The Good’ and ‘The Bad’ are subjective; I will qualify them.

The Good PM is someone who delivers on time, flows and empowers business with information, and most importantly doesn’t aggravate those he’s reliant upon to complete his projects.

The Bad PM is someone who fails to deliver on time, hides and disables business with ill/mis-information, and aggravates those he’s reliant upon to complete his projects.

Delivering, informing and aggravating are all linked to each other in an all-or-none fashion. In my analysis, there has only been one PM in the middle ground, having some but not all qualities. What makes The Good PM, to me, is their ability to locate mavens, and establish connecting relationships with them. The ability to find the mavens and develop a trusting relationship, is the key difference between The Good and The Bad Project Manager.

Find mavens and establish a relationship is outside of the PM’s role, but this ability/skill is the maker or breaker in their working life. The good PM’s seem to be very ‘wise’, life experienced people. They are able to understand, relate and communicate to others. One of The Good PM’s humbly calls himself ‘a facilitator of people’. A Good PM himself has spent a long time learning people, which is not a text book formula or algorithm. These Good PM’s have a personal understanding of human psychology, and the working of ego.

At the end of my analysis, of all the Ptoject Managers, I found less than 10% that meet my qualities of what makes The Good Project Manager.

I remember only 2 of them

D.

10% - yeah…probably about right mate.

You could expand the question to what is a good Manager. Same thing, just scope of project differs. Scott Adams in his book “The Dilbert Principle” (the all time classic management training text - and I dare anyone to tell me there’s a better one) covers these management principles better than anyone. Most Managers are idiots!

I know that statement won’t offend anyone reading this, because managers reading this will put themselves into the minority straight away.

I used to get all my staff to read the book with instructions that should I ever do, say or behave in any way like that, I wanted to know about it. Thus, I can honestly say from a work perspective, I was able to position myself, with a great deal of effort, away from mainstream idiotism. At present, I balance on the brink but because I own the company now, I can be classified as eccentric.

Regarding PMs, like all managers - the good ones don’t play the politics to the detriment of their own ethics and what they believe is right. Short term, they may get burnt and burnt many times by some good game players, but long term, somewhere, sometime, the qualities are recognised and their expertise and skills are allowed to burn brightly. Somewhere along the line, many good ones cross to the dark side and eventually become part of the 90%.

[...] As I listened in on the specifics of the project and the role requirements (it’s for a regional project manager role) it became quite obvious that the learning curve would be steep, and that the responsibility of the success of the project would rest solely upon the project manager leading it ie. potentially me. [...]

I find that so much of the problems that PM’s face ( like scope creep) can be avoided by taking one simple (complicated) rule. Include every team member no matter how small in every meeting especially those with the client. That way even if the leadership fails, every member no matter how small their task is knows what the client is expecting. Having this overarching knowledge helps guide the project in everyone’s mind. As opposed to a single person struggling to explain what he wants singularly. project manager jobs are a taxing business, but the payoff and job flexibility are what makes it such an important position. I was researching what an average PM makes and I was surprised at what I learned, some make a lot more than others. So most important is to know the value of your work.
-D