The role of project management is not nearly as straightforward as you’d think. When you ask someone, and they answer with words like planning and controlling and managing, that doesn’t seem like much. But in all reality, each of those words acts as an umbrella over a bunch of individual tasks.
It’s a bit confusing, like an “if you know, you know” situation. That’s why we thought clearly defining “project management” would be helpful. Whether you are curious about becoming a project manager or you simply want to be sure you’re doing your job right, it doesn’t matter. Everyone can use a reminder once in a while.
In this article, we’ll take a look at each of the following
- The roles and responsibilities of a project manager are
- Tasks involved in project management
- A “Day In The Life” of a project manager
- The most common stressors and how to handle them
- What skills a project manager needs
- The importance of this role
But first, let’s clarify a few points.
What Is Project Management?
If you have googled “project management definition,” you’ll have seen that the answer can get complicated. That’s because the exact job description of a project manager is hard to nail down. It goes back to the umbrella issue, vague words with significant meanings.
In the simplest terms possible, project management is a field dedicated to guiding a project (or a series of tasks with a connected result) to completion. In less simple terms, project management is an administrative division the performing organization assigns to lead the team responsible for achieving the project objectives.
Okay, so people in project management plan, execute, and complete projects? Why does that still seem like a complete reduction?
Well, ask anyone who has planned any family event, ever. Just making sure people know when to show up at your kid’s birthday is hard, let alone getting all of the other details right. These definitions are misleading and uncomfortable because they leave a lot of room for interpretation. What does planning mean? What does leading mean? That’s why we’re here.
What Is A Project Manager?
Oversimplifications aside, a project manager has a big job. You could easily argue that they’re integral to a project’s completion. They act as middlemen whose main job is ensuring progress. It’s not easy.
To really hit that home, let’s talk about what exactly project managers do.
The Role of the Project Management
Along with planning, executing, and successfully completing the project, project managers are also responsible for ensuring that all project stakeholders are satisfied with the outcome, results, or end product. But what does that really mean?
It means that all of your efforts are geared toward the success of the project, which means the scope happens inside of the timeframe and budget initially agreed upon. That effort involves a lot of individual tasks, but it is essentially its five main themes.
- Having a crystal clear understanding of the project goals and objectives
- Communicating these goals and objectives to the team
- Managing the expectations of the stakeholders and keeping them updated on the project’s progress
- Organizing and delegating tasks and responsibilities to team members
- Controlling the scope and making changes as needed
Everything A Project Manager Does
Words like “planning,” “executing,” and “controlling” are almost too indefinite to represent all the things a project manager does. You do a lot more than what those terms immediately imply.
The role of a project manager is, in our opinion, best explained as a “middleman” or “hub” between customers, stakeholders, and team members. They work to support everyone’s needs as they relate to the project.
Sometimes that means protecting the team’s best interest, and other times that means saying no to ad hoc requests. But to lay it out as clearly as possible, below we break down each of the tasks project managers find themselves regularly completing. These include
- Planning Everything
- Leading The Team
- Delegating Tasks
- Managing Time
- Controlling Scope
- Delivering Deliverables
- Monitoring Progress
- Meeting With Everyone
- Sharing Vision
- Managing Documentation
- Coming Up With Plan B
- Team Support
- Connecting Teams
- Coordinating With Clients
1. Planning Literally Everything
Every significant progression that happens on a project is only possible because someone planned out the completion of each step. That falls to the project manager.
There will be project schedules, risk management plans, communication management plans, quality assurance plans, and more. When things happen, where things happen, and what will be accomplished will all be handled by the project manager.
It takes the burden of the planning off of any team members who are using their skills to actually complete those tasks, which is very helpful as this level of coordination is very time-consuming.
2. Directing, Motivating, & Supporting The Team
Planning technically bleeds into this concept of “directing,” but it’s still different. When the day you’ve planned for comes, the team might have questions, comments, and concerns about what they are supposed to be doing.
When issues arise, or situations conflict with their needs, a project manager will find ways to help them forward. And sometimes, when no one wants to be there doing this thing, they give pep talks.
3. Delegating With Precision
A considerable aspect of the role of project management is delegation. In a professional setting, it’s very helpful to have a resource that understands what you are supposed to be doing, what you are doing next, and what the overall goal is.
The person performing the task needs to focus on that, which means project management is responsible for taking the burden off the team members. And often, stakeholders have a million other things going on, which means they can help guide the general direction, but they do not have the ability to pay close attention to detail.
In our “day in the life” section below, we show you exactly how delegation and other roles of the project manager look in real life.
4. Managing Time With The Four P’s
As a team leader, you have to be so careful with time. Wasting it costs everyone and will make you the bad guy very, very quickly. There might be no better application for time management than project management.
So, we recommend that you use the Four Ps. This could also be used in your personal life, but what you do once you take off your project management hat is your business.
The Four P’s include
- Plan – We technically covered this part, but it really is so important. A detailed project schedule is a project manager’s holy text that needs to be made and cared for.
- Prioritize – Ad hoc requests will come and try to ruin all of your beautiful plans. And you will have to rework those plans of yours to involve—at least some—of these requests (depending on your project). This means you’ll have to choose your focus from time to time, even when there are other things on your plate.
- Push – This could also be called “push through” because that’s what this means. Once you decide what tasks will be prioritized, you have to dedicate all available effort to those selected priorities.
- Party – At the end, you have to reward that completion. All the steps previous to this one have to have a payout moment, especially for that team of yours. Just don’t forget to celebrate the milestones, or things get monotonous.
5. Controlling Scope Like A Bull Rider
What we mean is working with changes and issues so that they don’t buck you entirely off and trample you.
As the project manager, it is your responsibility to ensure that the project’s scope is controlled and its cost is kept within budget. One way to think of scope is like having a boundary around the project. Everything inside the boundary is part of the project, and everything outside is not.
A considerable part of your role is going around that parameter and making sure things aren’t trying to escape, like farmers and frisky cows. Keeping the scope well-defined and focused will help keep the project on track and prevent it from getting bogged down with too much work.
Controlling your project scope and avoiding scope creep involves
- Define the scope of the project clearly from the outset.
- Clarify precisely what is in and what is out of scope in reference to the expected deliverables—you could call this “defining exclusions.”
Be sure that all stakeholders agree on the scope (and what is not included) before proceeding.
6. Delivering Deliverables
At the beginning of a project, the customer and all the other relevant stakeholders decide on what the scope is, which means deciding on what is to be delivered upon completion.
That task is often the responsibility of the project manager. Whether that means handing over the keys to the house you just built or giving them access to the software your team just finished, it’s the same idea. At the end of the day, the stakeholders and customers will be handed something, and the project manager is almost always the one handing it out.
7. Meetings, Meetings, & More Meetings
If project managers are constantly communicating progress, updates, and changes to stakeholders, then it’s not a stretch to say the job involves a lot of meetings. Some projects can require meeting a few times a week. Some have a few each day. The amount depends on the company culture, the nature of the project, and the number of projects being handled at one time.
8. Sharing The Vision
As the project goes on, it’s not uncommon for those involved to lose sight of the end goal. Due to that line of thinking, people get caught up in their feelings. They forget the “why” and just focus on the annoying aspects of how. Another role of project management is sharing the vision, which entails asking them to step back and see the bigger picture with you. You’ll find yourself doing this a lot.
9. Checking In With Stakeholders
In addition to being responsible for the project’s overall success, project managers must also ensure that all stakeholders are happy with the final product. They must effectively communicate with all stakeholders throughout the project. At times, they must also be able to resolve any conflicts that may arise.
There are times when this means working through ad hoc requests. Some requests will not work out, and you have to be the one to tell them. Some requests will fit in with the timeline and budget just fine. Either way, being sure that all relevant stakeholders know what’s going on, how things are going, and anything else they want to know is a classic project management role.
10. Documenting & Reporting Everything
If you read through any of our other posts, you’ll likely see a bit about “documenting everything.” Not only is it sound advice for making your life easy, but it’s also one of the pillar roles of project management.
When stakeholders or team members have questions, they’ll turn to the project manager for answers. It’s expected that you have different layers of documentation.
Having documentation is just as important when things go wrong. The project manager will likely be called to tell those involved why things went the way they did. At that moment, it will be in everyone’s best interest that there were paper trails for everything.
But either way, even if things go wrong or right, it’s down to project management to have documentation of everything that happened on the project.
11. Communicating With Everyone
This is yet another reason we can call a project manager the middleman. It’s not a stretch to say that people in this role communicate with many different parties for many different reasons on many different occasions.
Communication management plans are a thing for a reason. You can find out how to make your own here.
12. Plan B, C, D, and E
Before the project really gets moving, the project manager is expected to take a look at the road to completion and look for any potential roadblocks–the really big tree that sits at an angle that could fall, the pothole that could get worse, the water moving quietly under that bridge that only needs some rain to be scary.
It’s the project manager’s responsibility to take a look at each of these potential problems and say, “What if that happens? What do we do?” We all know that something going wrong is inevitable. As the project moves along, progress will waiver, speed up, or stop altogether. That can really mess with morale.
When the project hits roadblocks, it makes us feel like we have no options, but project managers have to be a bit smarter than that. That is why another suitable name for this responsibility is risk management.
It’s the act of expecting problems and creating potential plans for them. What do you do when that tree falls? Do you have a crew come in with chainsaws and cut it away? It’s a big tree. How long would that take? How far would that push us back with the schedule?
Do you get the point?
Project managers need to be very proactive, mentally playing out that scenario like it’s a monologue and having something in place for when something goes wrong (because something always does).
13. Keeping Things Close-Knit
If the project manager is a sort of middleman/hub, that means we are all recognizing that different parties involved in a project’s completion are separated and, therefore, have separate interests. This can look like
- The team being focused on handling each task as it comes.
- The stakeholders looking at the bigger picture and moving things around to benefit the budget, scope, or timeline.
- The customer not caring about any of that stuff and just wanting a better return on their investment.
That is a lot of divided effort. Technically, they are all working towards the same goal (a completed project), but not at all for the same reasons. The project manager’s job is to connect those parties (and their interests). Progress is not helped by division.
And we acknowledge that you might have never heard this part of the role of project manager discussed, but anyone who has handled the job knows that this is true and can be a bit annoying.
14. Co-ordinating With & Around Clients
As we said above, customers want a solid ROI. They are rarely concerned with the team’s task load or with the stakeholder’s needs.
It’s so common for customers to want more added to the scope with the gentle caveat of not adding any more time or money to successfully complete it, directly resulting in scope creep. This means that another responsibility of the project manager is both working with and working around customers. They are instrumental to their being a project in the first place, but they can make things difficult.
Another aspect of this is Ad Hoc requests. Yes, they signed off on the original scope. Yes, they said, “There will be nothing else to do, just this.” And yes, not they are coming to you with, like, 9 things more they want you to do.
Sometimes, an aspect of the project management role is saying no.
A Day In The Life
After sorting through all of the different aspects of the role of project management, it’s only fair to walk you through what that looks like in real life. We can talk about planning all day long, but what goes into planning? What do project managers work on? When they sit at a computer, what do they look at?
Well, being what is essentially a master planner often means working in between different groups, asking and answering a lot of questions, and constantly organizing. Some pivotal aspects of this include
- Email communication
- Team meetings
- Leadership (or stakeholder) meetings
- Budget meetings
- Schedule coordination
- Project check-ins
- Other forms of communication
The Project Management Institute (PMI) estimates a project manager spends around 90% of their time communicating with people and nothing else. The middleman label makes sense now, right?
So, a day in the life of a project manager might look something like this
1. Wake Up & Start The Day
This, of course, looks different for everyone, but it’s important to get yourself sorted before you ever try to sort out all of the other things a project manager does. Therefore, you have to fill your own cup first. Whether that looks like getting your kids moving, walking your dog, getting in the zone with caffeine, or trying to remain as “zen-like” as possible, it doesn’t matter. You have to do you first.
If you have a project that allows you to be remote, you might be “commuting” to your home office. But if you are managing a construction project or you have an office, you’ll be literally commuting.
And the start of your professional day will commence. This might be where you check all of those emails, confirm some meetings, and do any necessary prep.
2. Planning
Throughout this article, we’ve stressed how much planning the project manager does. Now, the question is, when do they do that?
As with any profession, project managers tend to structure their focus work around the goal or purpose of meetings. So, if you get through all of the most necessary emails, you might have time before your next commitment to get into some of that “planning.”
This might look like
- Creating a project schedule
- Creating the work breakdown structure (WBS)
- Contacting vendors
- Ordering materials or services
- Organizing the project schedule
- Organizing project notes and documentation
- Maintaining and managing the project’s budget
This part of project management is kind of continuous. It’s not unfathomable to think you’d be required to bounce from communicating, to planning, to meeting all day long.
3. Team Meetings & Leadership/Stakeholder Meetings
Purposeful meetings are integral to the role of project management. We separate team meetings from leadership ones because they usually have different intentions.
In a team meeting, you are getting updates from the source. They have their hands and eyes directly on the project, so they know better than anyone how things are going. These meetings should be treated as ways to collect information.
In leadership meetings, they have a bigger picture in mind. And while there is information collected from these meetings, the intention is more about updating those with a stake in the project. These can be people who have invested money or other kinds of resources in the project, people who are involved in multiple projects, and people who are directly benefiting from completion, such as customers.
4. Project Check-in
If your project has a physical location, there will come a time in your day or your week when you need to look it over with your own eyes. This means that the average project manager needs to visit the site or work through the progress the team has made via a screen share or prototype.
5. More Communicating
Emails are a constant in modern professional life, so if you handled them at the start, you’ll need to handle them again. There might also be calls, impromptu meetings, texts, and more.
As with any industry, there’s a lot more detail that will be worked into each day. Each communication will involve a particular situation, message, response, etc. But if you ask anyone currently working as a project manager, they are likely to agree that the position is mostly comprised of communicating with any and all participants in the project.
Is Being A Project Manager Stressful?
Honestly, what job isn’t stressful? With that line of thinking, the answer is yes. But we’d like to add some nuance.
Being a project manager can be stressful if you let it. Meaning if you are organized, proactive, and communicative, your life will be much easier and much more enjoyable than someone who fails to do any of that.
The act of being a “middleman” is not easy because it means answering to a lot of different people with a wide range of intentions all day long, but there are ways to streamline anything if you try hard enough.
Most Common Stressors
Don’t worry. We weren’t just going to warn you that this role can be stressful and leave it at that. Each industry has its own niche issues that are constantly rearing their ugly little heads. And most of them are no different from any other business.
For example, in retail or any kind of store-front, rude people or people who completely lack self-awareness are a constant bother. In design, people saying they want one thing, getting it, not liking it, and needing it completely redone happens all the time.
But in project management, our annoying, niche issues include
- Ad Hoc Requests – specifically stakeholders wanting more done in less time with no additional funding. We love that.
- Huge Delays – this can look like a vendor swearing on their dead aunt that you will have that thing in hand by Monday, and you get it three Mondays later. Woohoo!
- Little Fires Everywhere – everyone has a problem with everything, and no one can get past their problem without this resource that you could never have accounted for in your wildest dreams.
Procrastination is also an issue in project management, but we don’t talk about that one. It makes us feel better.
What Are The Skills/Qualifications Needed?
While many project managers have a background in engineering, business administration, construction trades, or information technology, it’s not that necessary. You can leave any field and enter project management as long as you can navigate professional circumstances with strong leadership, organizational, and motivational skills.
As the project manager, your role is to ensure the success of the project. You’ll need to have a strong understanding of what it takes to succeed in any project, which is something you can develop. Like a project spidey-sense. Here are some key skills that we believe will help you succeed
- Communication: You need to be able to communicate clearly and effectively with all members of the project team. This includes being able to give clear instructions and updates, as well as listening to and understanding the concerns of others.
- Organizational: A successful project manager is highly organized and can keep track of all the moving parts, and we won’t lie; there are a lot of them. This includes creating and maintaining detailed project plans, schedules, and budgets.
- Leadership: Being a strong leader will enable you to get the most out of your team. This means being able to motivate and inspire others to achieve their best work. It also means being able to make tough, sometimes unpopular decisions when necessary and dealing with undesirable results effectively.
- Problem-Solving: No matter how well you plan, there will always be problems that arise during a project. As the project manager, it’s your job to identify these problems and find solutions that will get the project back on track.
Project managers are responsible for ensuring that all members of a project team are aware of their roles, their responsibilities and that they understand the project’s objectives. In order to do this effectively, project managers must possess strong communication skills.
Communication Skills
Strong communication skills are essential for any project manager who wants to have an impact. If you’re not sure whether or not you have strong communication skills, there are some things you can do to improve them:
- First, make sure that you’re always clear and concise when communicating with others.
- Second, practice active listening so that you can better understand what others are saying.
- And finally, make sure that you’re always open to feedback so that you can learn from your mistakes.
If you are interested in becoming a project manager, there are many online resources that can help you get started. There are also many professional organizations that offer certification programs. Most notably, the Project Management Institute Project Management Professional (PMP) certification.
The Importance of Project Management
Each year, companies across the world are concentrating more and more effort on project-based work. So, it makes sense that we are seeing a significant increase in the need for project managers and management as a whole.
As we’ve been saying for the last few thousand words, there’s a lot that goes into this position. There are many fine lines that these people have to navigate. Some of those will be easier for you, some will be much harder, and that will completely depend on who you are as a person.
Our goal is to support project managers, portfolio managers, and program managers alike. They are all such niche roles with very unique problems, and we want to help you navigate them.
As a project manager, your role is to ensure the successful completion of a project. This requires planning, coordination, and communication with all stakeholders. It can be a challenging role, but it is also very rewarding. With the right skills and attitude, you can succeed in any project.
The most important thing for you to remember is that you are not alone in this role. The team members are there to support you and help you achieve the project goals. Work together with them, and you will be successful.
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