Chapter 5: The Project Manager and the Project Team

Who is The Project Manager

A PM is the person who leads a project from its phases of initiation to closure in the project life cycle. This also includes the planning, managing people and resources, and performing of the project. Thus, the PM must possess disparate set of skills such as management of conflict, team and risk change, leadership, technical problem solving, and customer relationship. The definition of PM provided by Project Management Institute is given as follows: “They are organized, passionate and goaloriented who understand what projects have in common, and their strategic role in how organizations succeed, learn and change” According to PMBOK, the project manager is the person assigned by the performing organization to lead the team that is responsible for achieving the project objectives.

A PM is a kind of bridge. Mechanisms are developed to facilitate communication between the PM and top management, the functional areas, and the client. If you are a PM and assigned to a project with an end date that you did not determine, avoid the temptation to improve your schedule by working backwards from the end date to the current date. This will give a wrong intention of what is achievable and hide the actual level of risk involved in the meeting at that time. The task of the project manager is to ensure that everyone in the project team has what they need to do their job well.

Attributes of Being an Effective Project Manager

One of the most important decisions concerning the project is the selection of the PM. Meredith and Mantel mentioned a list of some of the most popular attributes, skills and qualities that have been sought in the selection of the PM:

• A strong technical background
• A hard-nosed manager
• A mature individual
• Someone who is currently available
• Someone on good terms with senior executives
• A person who can keep the project team happy
• One who has worked in several different departments
• A person who can walk on (or part) the waters

A good manager knows what he/she is doing, can start new projects, and face the challenges that come with them. Although the main role of a PM is to get the job done, there are many other roles. Some of the roles may be based on the PM’s attributes. The attributes of the project manager that determine their roles in a project are as follows: powerful communication skills, proficient technical skills, managing resources, good decision maker, managing risk, perfect visionary, negotiating skills, team building and leadership.

Responsibilities of Project Manager

The PM has many responsibilities but they are primarily divided into three separate groups:

• The responsibility to the main company includes the appropriate care of resources, convenient and correct project communications, adequate and apprehensive project management.
• The responsibility to the project and the customer is fulfilled by ensuring that the integrity of the project is maintained despite the contradictory demands of many parties with legitimate interests.
• The responsibility to the project team is determined by the finite nature of the project and the expertise structure of the team. Because the project is, by definition, a temporary entity and must come to an end, the PM must be concerned with the future of the people who serve on the team.

Since there are many responsibilities, there are cons and pros of becoming a project manager just like in every profession or work as being a project manager could happen accidentally and you may not know anything about how to run a project.

Pros: It can often be a steppingstone to promotion. It provides a strong sense of accomplishment. There’s considerable variety: no two days are alike. There’s significant freedom of choice. It affords the opportunity to effect change across the organization.

Cons: It requires significant tolerance for politics. It requires significant tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. There’s a lot of responsibility, but little or no authority. You may feel “disconnected” from your technical discipline. You may be perceived by some as not having “a real job.”

Project Manager and Project Stakeholders

Those who will be project managers for the first time are very ambitious to implement their own ideas and manage their team so that they can complete the projects successfully. What they soon learn is that the success of the project depends on the cooperation of a wide range of individuals, many of whom do not report directly. Many of the PMs find themselves spending much of their time with negotiating and working with consultants, technical specialist, and other managers instead of working with their team to complete the project. Thus, the customer is the most important project stakeholder that influences the success of the project depending on its nature. Each of these groups of stakeholders brings different expertise, standards, priorities, and agendas to the project.

A stakeholder is an individual, group, or organization that may affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project. In PMBOK, it was mentioned that there could be internal and external project stakeholders, which might be actively involved, passively involved, or unaware of the project. External stakeholders are ; customers, end users, suppliers, shareholders, regulatory bodies and competitors.

Internal stakeholders are; sponsor, resource manager project management, office (PMO), portfolio steering, committee, program manager, PMs of other projects and team members.

Managing Versus Leading a Project

Words project manager and leader are overlapping concepts, and they are often confused and used interchangeably. Hence, the question that comes to mind when we say leadership is: ‘Is every manager a good leader?’ or ‘Is every leader a good manager?’ The answer leads us to an expectation for project managers to be leaders; however, project manager and leader are two different things. Although the management and leadership are two different things, a PM should ensure both of them in order to be successful.

What is Leadership?

The leadership is the action of leading a group of people or an organization to achieve the goals.

Leaders vs. Managers

Project managers focus more on administrative skills while leaders bring emotional intelligence to the forefront for the achievement of project success. Thus, PMs count on authority, leaders on impact. The management role is more administrative like other management roles. Leadership, on the other hand, is about interpersonal relations. Larson and Gray denoted that management is about coping with complexity, while leadership is about coping with change. Although project manager and the leader are two overlapping concepts and mentioned together, they are different from each other.

Leaders: do the right thing, develop new processes, innovate, originate, earn their position, command respect, focus on people, inspire trust, focused on potential, have long-term goal.

Managers: do things right, maintain the status quo, administer, imitate, state their position, demand respect, focus on systems, strive for control, focused on the bottom line, short-term view.

In project management, effective team leaders can usually create a partnership approach between themselves and their teams. The idea of leadership as a partnership is crucial for project management because it emphasizes the importance of all leaders ultimately dependent on their teams to achieve their project objectives. Four things are required to develop the idea of partnership between the project manager and the team: Exchange of purpose, a right to say no, joint accountability and absolute honesty.

A big portion of the PM’s role and responsibility includes people. A PM has to be face to face mainly with customer and team. Thus, a PM should analyze the behaviors and motivations of people. Since the leadership is crucial to the project success as discussed above, a PM should be a perfect leader. A Project Manager is the rudder of a project.

The Project Team

As we stated earlier, a PM is assigned to a project, but he/ she cannot carry out the project alone. If you refer back to the first section, it was pointed out that building a team was one of the PM’s attributes and is crucial to end up the project successfully. Hence, the project manager should form a team to work with before continuing the project.

The Definition of Project Team

A project team consists of a group of people who have come together to carry out activities that contribute to achieving the goal of a common task. A PM builds up a project team of skilled employees from the same or different function areas to work on a project. A project team consists of team members from different departments of an organization, thus most project teams can be classified as cross-functional teams. The cross-functional team may include team members from the departments of Research and Development (RD), finance, marketing, human factors, etc. and from all levels of the organization. In addition, members may also be from external stakeholders such as suppliers and consultants.

Staffing and Building a Project Team

A person in an organization can be assigned as a PM by chance; however, project teams do not happen by chance. As soon as a PM is assigned to conduct a project, he/she should start building up a team. Regardless of the circumstances, the PM is faced with the challenge of creating a high performing and cohesive project team from a set of diverse individuals. A person in an organization can be assigned as a PM by chance; however, project teams do not happen by chance. As soon as a PM is assigned to conduct a project, he/she should start building up a team. Regardless of the circumstances, the PM is faced with the challenge of creating a high performing and cohesive project team from a set of diverse individuals. The PM should spend a great deal of effort and time to develop a project team. Then, at the point where they start working jointly, the project team develops its members and obtains positive dividends from the joint performance of the project. The team members can also work on one or more project stages. In addition, when one of the team members is responsible for a task, he/she can play a key supportive role for another task. We can understand that the roles can change according to the type of a project. However, the duties of the project team members remain. These duties are as follows:

• Providing effort to the whole project to meet the objectives
• Completing individual products of the project such as reports, models, designs, plans, etc. by the due date
• Delivering expertise
• Working with users to identify and meet business requirements
• Reporting status updates to PM
• Establishing records of project including the documents
• Attending and active participation in the meetings
• Ensuring the tasks to be completed on time
• Performing assigned activities

As humans develop in certain ways in the first months of their lives, many experts argue that groups are developing in a predictable model. Furthermore, Larson & Gray (2018) and Pinto (2016) mentioned that one of the most popular models identified five stages in which groups developed into effective teams. These five stages are forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning.

Attributes of the Project Team

If a PM is bringing the team members together for the upcoming project, it is essential that she/he know the attributes of an effective project team. This will let the PM select the right people for every attitude of the project and look for a successful project.

Parker (2008) indicated four styles of team members where each contributed in different ways to the success of the team, and each style had a downside when carried to an extreme. According to Parker’s study:

• A Contributor is a task-oriented team member who enjoys providing the team with good technical information and data, does his or her homework, and then pushes the team to set high performance standards and to use their resources wisely.
• A Collaborator is a goal-directed member who sees the vision, mission, or goal of the team as paramount but is flexible and open to new ideas, is willing to pitch in and work outside his or her defined role, and is able to share the limelight with other team members.
• A Communicator is a process-oriented member who is an effective listener and facilitator of involvement, conflict resolution, consensus building, feedback, and the building of an informal, relaxed climate.
• A Challenger is a member who questions the goals, methods, and even the ethics of the team, is willing to disagree with the leader and others, and encourages the team to take well-conceived risks.

Pinto (2016) stated that successful teams shared common underlying features, including a clear sense of mission, an understanding of team interdependencies, cohesiveness, a high level of trust, a shared sense of enthusiasm, and a results orientation. Besides, Larson and Gray (2018) highlighted the conditions where high-performance project teams are likely to develop.

The reasons for why teams fail are as important as the development characteristics of high performance and effective project teams. It is not unexpected that project teams fail to carry out their potential in many conditions since there are always deep challenges in building a high performance and effective project teams. Pinto (2016) indicated that project teams perform at less than optimum performance for a number of reasons including poorly developed or unclear goals, poorly defined project team roles and interdependencies, lack of project team motivation, poor communication or leadership, turnover among team members, and dysfunctional behavior.