The modern business world is complex and incorporates numerous concepts, giving people roles that they may not understand the extent of their responsibility. The focus of today is the responsibilities and methodology of being an effective project manager.
By definition, a project manager (PM) is the leader and director of a small group of people within a larger company. The project can be anything that pertains to the larger business and their ongoing operations. Being a PM is about balancing the cost, consistency of schedule, and identifying the scope and risks. They are responsible for planning and executing an effective and quality project. Additionally, the PM is responsible for overseeing any issues that may arise internally or externally to the project.
The first duty of a project manager is to formulate a management plan. This includes deciding the roles of the members and their responsibilities, resource implementation estimate, and a general time and workload scope of the project. There are three main concepts that a PM must understand when making a formulating the management plan; cost, scope and time. When the balance between these three forces is found, a quality management plan has been formulated. This is the business concept of the Project Management Triangle; finding a balance in the management plan. The STR model is a mathematical perspective of looking at the project management triangle:
scope = time x cost
The aspect of “cost” is about having the sufficient resources to fully run the project. A resource is defined as any consumable asset the project uses; this includes money, supplies, labour, motivation etc. When developing a management plan, it is important not to strain the use of your resources while still using the given resources efficiently. The aspect of “time” is about understanding the temporal limitations of workloads of the project. Often times, a PM will be given a project and they will have to set deadlines for tasks to coincide with the employees work efficiency. The aspect of “scope” is a combination of the two previous aspects. It is about determining the limitations of the project’s deadline. Having a short deadline for a project will lead to strains on cost and time to extremes as everything needs to be completed swiftly. This leads to a poor quality project. Having a long deadline may seem beneficial, but it is wasting financial resources and time. Finding a balance to have work be completed efficiently will best suit the management plan.
Once the project has commenced, the duty of the PM is to not necessarily work on the project but to monitor employees, enforcing the management plan and problem solve obstruction of workflows. While performing duties as a project manager, it is important to be able to adapt to each situation as there will be several unique problems that may occur. Some of these situations that may occur include additional team building, training, and misestimation of cost, scope or time which often lead to readjusting the management plan.
In conclusion, being an effective project manager is about observing what you have (resource and time) in order to envision something it could be. While you are not acting on it yourself, PMs are to remain present in the process in order to keep the project on track, despite what roadblocks may appear.
