Good question, someone asked me a few days ago and it got me thinking about the essentials. So what does a good PM do actually?
Here’s a list of good PM behaviors that I think are important:
- communicate with all the people who are influenced by the project
- monitor and control the scope, budget and planning constrains
- understand the content of the project in enough detail to communicate, monitor and control efficiently
- create situations that allow the team to focus on the project goals
- help people to get the feedback they need to grow (not the same as coaching)
To give you some context on my list, in my company we create teams around a project most of the time, it’s what the Project Management Body of Knowledge
I had a discussion about this topic recently as well and found out that what really makes a pm great is the ability to ‘shoot the project breeze’. Have small informal status updates at the coffee machine or when crossing each other in the hallway. During these chats, information gets exchanged in a two way fashion so the pm has his status / difficulties info, and the developers have their “what’s in the pipeline” info. Obviously, brief chats like these are not meant to replace the more classic status meetings, but they do offer a lot of perspective and make everyone on the project more informed as a whole.
Cool perspective, making the info go around in a natural way like that makes a lot of sense.