As part of my day job I work with many project managers at work. Each PM I work with has the
ir talents and strengths. But each also has their weaknesses.
When it comes to project management, I am surprised that one of the most fundamental things that I did not learn when working with PMs at work is the importance of building alliances with resources that you have no authority over.
Key Takeaway:
- When a Project Manager has no authority over resources in a project (which is often the case on most projects), the Project Manager must cultivate the relationships with the resources in an informal manner. This includes chatting with the individual resources and potentially even “befriending” the resources in order to gain the trust and committment from resources to work on the project.
Its amazing. During the class tonight we were asked to read through a case study. It described the activity of a Project Manager in what seemed to be a typical day. The key points I got out of the 2 page case study was that there was this PM that would go from person to person chit chatting about the latest gossip and what people were doing on the weekend. Granted, the PM did do other things as well like meet with the clients to talk about scope creep etc and managed those quite well. At the end of the case study we were asked whether or not the PM was doing a good job. To me, I felt that the PM was doing a lousy job because all she was doing was going from person to person chit chatting about what was happening in the person’s personal life. During the day, the PM had the audacity of turning on the music in her office and resting. This gave me a very bad impression of her as a PM. So naturally I responded that way.
Little did I know that that was exactly what a good PM ought to be doing. IE building alliances with people that she did not have authority over. Professor Bedour Osman did a great job in explaining why it was so important for the a PM that gets a job at a new company to get to know the staff and to befriend them. This was a major epiphany for me because I turned around to my experience at work with all of the PMs that I’ve worked with over the years. I always seemed to have the impression that the BEST PMs were always the ones I got along with best. The absentee PMs were ineffective in my mind. The ones that were authoritarian never got their way since they did NOT have authority over the resources in the project. As such, it was a huge lesson learned that a successful PM is one that gets work done through others that the PM has no authority over. How? Through building alliances and building friendships with the resources on the team. Because of this, I like this course because I’m actually learning something useful at work. As an Architect, I think I need to do more of that.
The rest of the class discussed the project selection process. This was the usual info I expected: eg. doing an assessment of different projects based on criteria that is weighted and with each option scored. Refer to my other post for more info on this.
All in all, it was a good class.
Photo by icebirdy
