As you know that I have recently got promoted as Project Lead (at last......) @ Tesco. I have argued with my friends especially with Lenin that I do not find big difference between project management and tehnical management especially in terms of project delivery. Many people may argue that project management is purely about non-tehnical deliverables and technical stream is only about delivering technical design. But my argument is that in a ideal case the project manager should posses both technical as well management skill. In other words project manager should lead the design team and contribute something in the design.
I am trying to be stick in that line and I should go in that path. It means "Tehnical Project Lead/Management". In my argument I am putting these points,
- A builder should be a Civil Engineer who can deal with design as well as effectively manage to get the work done.
- If a person who has just money and just start the "Property development" he may not be succedeed with business as he neither do not have any clue about design nor doing effective people management.
- If we consider just a person who has management skill can not monitor or suggest the effective design.
With the common sense I am broadly splitting the managements into the following categories namely,
- Project Management (responsible for complete project life cycle)
- Business Management (responsible for finding new business opportunities and demanding the project management to deliver the solution)
I have learnt from both of my well-wishers Sankar and Steve that at any point in time we should not ignore or forget the technical line which is core required skill in the IT industry. We should always keep in touch with the coding!!!
Please argue with me!!!
Yours,
Ganesan S
It is not necessary that project manager should know the technical skill. If he knows then it is really good to project & he is an all rounder in a project.
ReplyDeleteNormally project manager will do the management rather than involving the technical design. Very rare manager will do both management & technical like you.
If manager does not know the technical design then he can hire one architect,
If he does not know the business (fully) then he can hire one business analyst
If he could not handle the development team then he can hire one project lead (most of the companies project lead will do all the works except the updates to management).
One incident was happened in one company that project manager does not know that how to do handle one developer out of 5 developers in a team and that developer is directly reported to him.
What manager did is he hired one project lead and ask developer do report to project lead. Then finally project is going good.
Interesting thoughts and to some extent I agree that it helps to know the specialism you are managing. However the Project Management training that I've attended or articles I've read generally disagree and see Project Management as the only required skill and it should be transferable across industries. On my IT PM course we were even given the example of building a house as the task - and why not? As long as you have experts that inform you of the jobs that need to be completed and their dependencies why do you need to know the intricate details?
ReplyDeleteOn a slightly different note you often see Cheif Executives move from one company to another company in an entirely different industry and I'd argue the same applies here.
In summary I think a good manager is a good manager and they will succeed regardless of the specialism they are managing.