What Did You Do Today?

[NickC]

Hi All

Strange question possibly?

My employers and colleagues all seem to have different ideas of what PM's should do as part of their role and the lines have become well and truly blurred. We don't have any 'bought in' project managers where I work, we just ask engineers to manage projects and we've been figuring it out ourselves.

I'm curious to what seasoned PM's actually do day to day and I think this may be useful to others to help develop role and responsibility definitions across the team.

It depends on whether PM is our only role, for example I still have engineering responsibilities but I find that with most PM / Engineers that engineering takes up 95% of their time and the PM stuff is left behind. This makes it difficult to distinguish between PM and team activities.

Any thoughts?


Thanks


Nick

[kwalford]

I would spend a lot of my own time communicating to stakeholders & resources and little time doing the actual work myself, that is what specialist resources are there for. It is said a PM spends in the region of 30% of their time communicating.

I handle a portfolio of various projects and allocating resources to each of the projects. This is where it sounds like you are failing. The PM is also doing their own work; rather than the PM allocating (managing) the work to another resource for them to complete the work package.

Would it be feasible for one person to manage the portfolio of projects and allow all the others to focus on the work?

There needs to be clear roles and responsibilities set out and people stick to these position (responsibly matrix would help). A PM should focus their time on managing the project and allow the resources to do the work. It sounds like you could do with a dedicated PM who manages the portfolio of projects and this person allows the resources to do the actual work.

It also sounds like you work in a matrix management environment. Is that right?

[NickC]

Thanks for the reply.


Regarding this:

Would it be feasible for one person to manage the portfolio of projects and allow all the others to focus on the work?

This is where my management team may go as it has been mentioned, but I am concerned that the projects will suffer if there isn't a low-level control in place of some kind - which I know is wrong and may be specific to the culture and individual management styles in my organisation.

I feel there's a lot of 'pushing along' required at task level.

[Mohamed.Benmerikhi]

Role interface between being and engineer and a PM is a complex issue. A healthy balance is difficult to achieve especially if the time allocated to working on projects has not been specified with defined days or hours.