Who is a Project Manager?

People with strong entrepreneurial mindsets make for outstanding project managers. The project manager’s role is to lead teams and team members over the finish line, and this enables them to think about a project beyond the fundamental skill set required to manage it. The project manager is ultimately responsible for the outcome and bears sole responsibility for the project’s success or failure.

“Project Managers play the lead role in planning, executing, monitoring, controlling, and closing projects. They’re expected to deliver a project on time, within the budget, and brief while keeping everyone in the know and happy.”

Cam Lee, Rock Agency

Basic activities that must be accomplished by a team on the schedule are called projects. To ensure that the team assigned to work on the project completely understands the expectations from the project and adequately delivers what has been expected it on time, a project manager is needed.

To ensure that everyone gets what they want out of the project, the project manager serves as a liaison between the client and the project team. As a result, the project manager serves as the conduit for communication between the client and the project resources. The project manager oversees the entire team to ensure that the objectives are met, and that the client receives a flawless product within the allotted time frames.

Key Roles & Responsibilities of a Project Manager in an Organization

Being an effective project manager requires the following organizing skills, which may be applied to a variety of projects:

1. Activity, and Resource Planning

Along with outlining the workflow, a project manager breaks down the many tasks that make up project activity. Project managers are expected to coordinate the numerous operations of a project with the available resources.

A clever project manager can spot resource waste and redeploy resources for higher uses or utilization when planning is done precisely and the progress of groups of activities is closely monitored. This holds true for natural, technical, physical, and human resources. As a result, at some time during the project, the project manager’s position changes to that of a Tracker.

2. Managing Risks & Containing Issues

Any competent project manager will understand that risk is anything that happens throughout the course of a project that is “not as per plan.” This unanticipated development could either be beneficial or detrimental to the project’s success. Managing risk is all about being ready to deal with it.

Risks will develop into significant problems if the project manager’s duties do not emphasize the necessity to list them as potentialities that could become realities. The project will experience issues that cannot be appropriately addressed if dangers are not recognized, classified, prioritized, and planned for.

3. Cost Estimation and Quality Satisfaction

Only with a precise cost estimation performed utilizing a top-down or bottom-up method can any product or service innovation be pursued to a successful conclusion. A project manager can divide the project into units using the bottom-up methodology, and each unit’s cost can be determined using metrics such as cycle time, resource usage, cost per person, and others. The project budget is then calculated by applying this to each unit. The top-down estimation strategy takes a more all-encompassing approach, considering significant spending headings, recurring and one-time expenses, as well as other parameters. Without realistic, pessimistic, and optimistic estimates, cost estimation is incomplete.

To satisfy quality standards and guarantee client satisfaction, cost-benefit trade-offs are one of the main duties of the project manager. So, the expense of quality management–which implies higher productivity at lower costs to fulfill stakeholder expectations– should not be neglected. 

4. Scalability, Interoperability, and Portability

First, a project manager must act quickly to determine whether a system or method being used to carry out a project can be “sufficiently” scaled to satisfy client requests.

Second, the project manager must be able to determine whether the software and hardware components may be set up differently to provide various organizational capabilities. It’s also crucial to determine whether a program or process can be converted to operate on a different operating system without requiring extensive rewriting.

5. Reporting and Documentation

The only way to maintain order and a sense of single-minded purpose when there are so many people working to bring a concept to life is to make sure there is a mechanism in place to report every small detail. Time logs, timetables, letters, and photographs are a few examples of documentation elements that, when recorded, offer proof, compile work, and highlight the project.

6. Communication

A proper medium (telephone, fax, encrypted, messenger), different channels (emails, memoranda, reports, press releases), and message structure (five W’s, i.e., Why, what, Where, When, Who, and one How) must be in place for communication to be effective.

As a result, managing every area of a project shapes the project manager’s communication style.

7. Strategic Influence

About stakeholders, suppliers, clients, end users, sponsors, governing bodies, steering committees, project team members, resource managers, and industry peers, a project manager’s sphere of influence is expanded by their various duties.

Conclusion 

The project manager is a flexible professional that employs a variety of knowledge, abilities, procedures, and methodologies to interact with internal teams and external stakeholders to contribute to the development of a technique or item that helps society. Not only are the duties many, but so are the roles played to complete a project successfully. A project manager’s management skills can be enhanced by traditional knowledge and experience, but industry-relevant certification is a big help in handling all job roles. So, give yourself a chance to enhance your Project Management skills, and excel in your career with Project Management Course at DeMont Institute of Management and Technology, UAE.