Sep 26 2007
Who manages a project, project manager or PMT?
From project management theory there might be no argument that a project
manager is the one who manages a project via the full project life
cycle. In IT projects, especially software development project it is even
more typical, project manager is in charge the whole thing.
However in those multi-million dollar projects, such as energy, chemical or hydrocarbon, there was a Project Management Team (PMT) who manages the project rather than a single person (project manager). The advantage of doing it in this way is that people who have different expertise should be responsible for their own areas and have the power to make decision across the whole project. Of course project manager is the one who coordinate these experts and make them work as a team. For instance, project controller, cost manager, procurement manager, HSE manager, and etc should play a totally different role and have the power to rule the project from his perspective. In the project that I used to work on, it worked very well by this model. It was a hydrocarbon project called LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) project with more than 1 billion budget and about 5 years duration. The project manager has huge trust on each discipline who is expert in his own area with years of experience. So it turned out to be project manager plays an coordinator’s role and focused on managing risks, changes and resources.
The same model can be applied to Agile project management too. Fortunately, there are some practices already, such as letting dev drive the estimation of stories, QA being in charge of the test strategies and plans. Furthermore, there are other issues that could be considered to be managed by PMT rather than project manager. Actually there is nothing that should only be managed by PM and for each discipline, the decision should be made by the expert with expertise.
So it would be the responsibilities of all the team members of managing a project. Everyone plays a role in managing a project and makes decision. Meanwhile all the decision should be made by certain discussion and communication with the whole team. For example, let developers drive and own all the development tasks, let QA own all the testing and deployment tasks and let IM/BA own all the customers requirement tasks, iteration planning. Every team should play a role in the risk management, change management and project controlling.
In this case how important is a project manager in a team and what should a project manager responsible for and focus on. Basically a project manager is responsible for coordinating a team of talents, supervising cost controlling, people management, team build and etc. Certainly a project manager is crucial in a project however with absence of a project manager the project is still can be carried by project team with self-management. The idea of doing it is to ensure that there is not absolute key person for a project.
Someone one might argue how could make it happen in real life and real projects? The answer is that you have to bring the right people to the project and let them do the right thing.
A project manager or lead might be the most goofy guy in a team but he is the one to organize and coordinate a group of talents people to work together. This is his expertise!
