Saturday, August 23, 2008

Business Development: The Expanding Role of the Project Manager

This is one of the best project management blogs I've found over the internet. It overs a wide range of subjects regarding project management. You can read the blog here or visit this site for more information.

Over the years, the term project manager has been defined in many ways that does not give a single description of the roles and responsibilities. Organizations have, without consideration for a standard definition, labeled individuals with the title of project manager whether they were responsible for a schedule, schedule and cost, or schedule, cost and product, or service performance.

Rightfully so, organizations tailored the roles and responsibilities to meet their business needs. This does, however, cause some confusion as to what are the full roles and responsibilities of a project manager. The USA National Competence Baseline (NCB) lists 49 elements (Editor’s note: there will be 49 with the addition of Business Development) of competence that are suggested areas of competence that a project manager should possess to fully meet the qualifications for managing a large, complex project. A person managing smaller and less complex projects would perhaps need less competence
in some of the areas, but more detailed depth in some of the technical competences. Organizations may selectively use the 49 competence elements to tailor the required qualifications of their project managers.

Competence Growth for Project Managers
The evolution of modern project management as a discipline, and the various roles for project managers have expanded. Where formerly the focus was relatively technical aspects for guiding projects through their life cycle to a realization, increasingly the context in which projects are implemented and the behavioral aspects of the project staff are also important for success. The three categories of project management elements, Technical, Contextual, and Behavioral, continue to evolve through better definitions and added competence elements.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think the issue is that most companies slowly promote from within, slowly adding responsibilities to, let's say, a developer, and then that developer is portrayed as a Project Manager, while, in real Project Management terms, s/he's not.

I have published an excellent article about the responsibilities of the project manager, take a look!