Make PM Work a Bit Easier

Everyday work of project manager is, well, interesting. You talk with clients. You manage your team and organize their work. You work on schedules. You prepare reports. You deal with different issues. You supervise everything. You prepare a thousand of different things. You create hundreds of documents. Phone calls, emails, instant messengers and meetings. Quite diverse job. And quite complex.

It requires specific type of people, that’s for sure. But you can do more. You can simplify a bit project manager’s work. How? Actually that’s the question for you.

Range of tasks done by PMs differs. There are companies where PM is one man army and is responsible for almost everything, sometimes even getting a deal. Unfortunately the more tasks are assigned to a project manager the less time he has to spend on the most important thing – managing a project.

If you can safely take off his head anything with no significant impact on business do it. Maybe budgeting can be done by someone else? Possibly presales team can take a bit more of work with preparing offers. Definitely someone should isolate PM from office wars and let him do his job. Nice idea is not to force project manager to think if he has enough office space for the team.

Sometimes when I talk with fellow PMs I’m surprised how many strange things they have to do. Typically these are things which PM will rather easily deal with although I can hardly say it’s typical PM job. Unfortunately it takes the time. First it takes time to do those things and second it takes time to switch threads. OK, PM will often switch threads anyway and unlike developer it’s rather normal situation but still, the less switching the better.

The recipe for each organization can be different. If no one else can prepare a budget for a project or there’s no sales force to work on new deals you can’t just cut out those tasks. But I guess there are things you could easily switch to more appropriate people. Just think about it.