Who Is On the Other Side?

Our team was reinforced lately by an experienced project manager. He worked in his previous company with one of our clients. I’d add that our client works in formalized environment where compliance with procedures is (usually) very important, which should limit freedom in project management. The interesting thing is we can confront our experience.

If I had to give one general conclusion I would say that the way the project is run is highly dependent on people, especially project managers, on client side.

Project manager’s strengths and weaknesses have great impact on the whole project. With a great organizer you won’t need to ping them for each delivery you’ve agreed. With a PM with wide technical knowledge most issues can be resolved in small group and there’s no need to check every little thing with specialists. Person who work in the organization for years will know each shortcut and backdoor within procedures and will be able to exploit them. Overloaded project manager won’t push a project very hard as he’s, well, overloaded. Guy who’s not liked much among colleagues will find hard to organize help whenever needed.

Project we compared were run completely different. While general procedures which applied were exactly the same project managers had different profiles. By the way, I guess if we had other guy on the other side we would finish our project later.

On a side note I’m sure the same rule applies when you’re a client and you look at vendor’s project manager.

That’s why it’s so important to know who is on the other side. You want it or not you’ll have to adjust to people you work with. You’ll need to exploit their strengths and mitigate impact of their weaknesses. And I’ve seen enough different types of PMs to believe that depending on people on the other side project implementation can look dramatically different.

Who is on your other side?