Monday, 28 May 2019
José Tomás Vargas José Tomás is an Information Engineer with more than 15 years of experience, 8 of them in CRM consulting and with a Master in Business Administration from the Instituto de Empresa. With Siebel he has had the opportunity to work on more than seven CRM projects of which he has participated directly in the management of four and has held positions of responsibility in the remaining three. Additionally, he has worked as a consulting and presales manager and is co-founder and partner of Autana Business Partners.
It is clear that, from all points of view, the human factor has a special preponderance in most projects, regardless of the existence of a technological component or not, which is why this article does not focus on demonstrating its importance, but on analyzing the variables, which from my point of view and experience, They have a decisive influence on the success or failure of IT projects in companies. In this article we will focus on one of the fundamental components of a project team: the Project Manager.
The Project Manager is the person in charge of managing the time and resources dedicated to the technical development of the project. It usually arrives at the project with the previously established deadlines and resources and in a large percentage of cases, it has no control over them, because they are established externally by the users (for example, the commercial department needs to start a sales campaign for a certain date and the system must be prepared for it) or because the project was sold and budgeted by an external consultant, Under certain premises, regardless of whether these premises continue to be maintained or not, the deadlines and resources used remain frozen, in order not to impact the economic margin that has been agreed from the beginning. It is necessary to clarify that in the latter case, it is normal that the Project Manager has no influence on the commercial agreements established between the consulting company and the company that implements the information system and additionally, most likely, has not previously participated in the sale process of the selected technological solution, which is why his maneuverability is very reduced.
Commonly (especially if you are part of an external consultancy), part of your incentives depend on meeting the deadlines and adjustment to the budget established for the project, so your interests will focus in that sense I will try to mobilize the rest of the team in order to achieve these objectives, whose achievement will depend, Among other things, the motivation of his team and his alienation with them, which is why he becomes the most responsible for the level of motivation maintained by the work team, regardless of the pressures exerted on him.
The Project Manager must be able to abstract the rest of the team members from external “political” influences, in order not to introduce unnecessary noise that can affect the quality of the results. Apart from your natural functions of planning and resource management, you must serve as a filter of environmental noise, work as a mentor to your team and above all earn their respect, either for their technical skills or for their management gifts (preferably, for both).
Here, from my experience, I identify what may be one of the first mistakes made in the management of a project, since there is a greater tendency to put pressure on the hours dedicated to work, when, from my point of view, this is one of the main reasons for demotivation of a team, More emphasis should be placed on the fulfillment of the assigned tasks and allowing more freedom in the way in which these tasks are fulfilled, as long as they are kept within the agreed deadlines and with an acceptable level of quality (this also depends on the level of maturity and professionalism of the rest of the project team). I also have to say that not necessarily the Project Manager is always able to decide the way in which it should or can work, since this can be previously established by the company (either the consultant or the client).
Another of the fundamental tasks of the project manager is to manage the expectations of the users, usually very high at the beginning of any project. Its objective, in this sense, will be to postpone non-essential or excessively expensive functional requirements to later phases of the project, so it will have to have good negotiation skills. The ultimate goal is always to develop a tool that facilitates the lives of users, adding value to them in their work so that they can be more efficient, making the organization for which they work more competitive, but always taking into account the cost/benefit ratio that may exist in the development of a certain functionality. This “negotiation of expectations” is usually one of the great points of tension between the client (or end user) and the project manager (especially when the latter is part of an external consultancy) and even more, when at the beginning the limits of the project have only been vaguely defined.
In summary, the basic skills of a project manager should include, among others, are:
- Real leadership over the team that accompanies you, so that you are able to achieve results in an efficient way.
- Ability to communicate, both towards your team and facing the client, to avoid falling into ambiguities and creating confusion in the messages that are intended to be given.
- Mentor of the team, providing motivation and assertiveness and correctly indicating the points of improvement of each one, as well as valuing their successes.
- Negotiation capacity, since everyone’s expectations can never be met in a project, so it will always be necessary to find a balance point
Finally, a project manager will rarely move in an environment with clearly defined variables, so his ability to move in a somewhat ambiguous terrain is key, not only for the projects he manages, but for his own personal life.
