Defining Roles: Project Manager

A good way to picture a project, is like a corporation. It is a “Thing” that doesn’t really exist, but is comprised of many real world things that do exist. The documents, code, and the people who produce it; bring life to something. All of this must come together to under the direction of a project manager, who guides the project through its “lifetime”. Projects are defined by:

• A budget of time
• A budget of money
• A certain amount of risk or uncertainty

In project management, the biggest concern is time and money. Money is yardstick by which time is being measured. The longer something takes, the more money it’s costing. This is where risk and uncertainty blow the budgets of most projects. Effective project management depends on an almost obsessive level of planning, to minimize risk. You need a well-designed plan for the project. A proper plan includes construction of a wireframe (business process), prototype (front-end), and architectural design (database field names). This level of detail, is to reduce the uncertainty and risk involved.

A project manager is concerned about:

• What are we going to do? - Taking into consideration the constraints of time, money, and resources; try and meet the requirements of a “wish list” set of goals or features the project is to include.
• What have we done? - Unless there is a plan for what will be done, it is impossible to gauge progress through benchmarks, or milestones, that have been reached.
• What did we do? - How much of the plan has been completed. This is where the obsessive part comes into play. There could be reams and reams of documentation involved. Not only for technical reasons, but maybe legal ones too? This documentation has to be created and maintained continually. The consequence, is a mad scramble when the project is “finished”. Because there is nothing to prove you’ve satisfied all the legal and customer requirements.

No matter how the technology changes, it’s sure to bring about inspiration and more ways to interact with tools, skills, and processes to undertake a project. The project manager uses these skills to produce repeated software project success.