Undocumented Features

Interviewing for a Project Management job is always a very complicated thing.  Project Manager has vastly different meaning from company to company- or in some cases, from department to department, or even from person to person.  It’s not that long ago that I was one of several project managers within a single department, all of whom had extremely different duties and levels of responsibility.

If you are like me, you a) like to know what expectations are, b) what your responsibilities are, and c) if there’s any tasks involve that you just hate doing.  Here’s a quick set of guidelines that you should check on to help you understand what you are getting into with a given job or assignment:

1. Does the project team or any portion of it report to me?
2. Am I responsible for creating, soliciting, documenting or approving requirements?
3. Am I responsible for creating or approving functional specifications?
4. Am I responsible for creating or approving technical specifications?
5. Am I responsible for creating or approving solution design?
6. Am I responsible for creating, contributing, documenting, or managing the project schedule?
7. Am I responsible for tracking or leading the project?
8. How will my responsibilities change over the life of the project?
9. Am I directly or indirectly accountable for the project outcome?
10. Am I responsible for creating, planning, distributing, or delivering training?
11. Am I responsible for creating, planning, or distributing marketing and communications to end consumers related to the deliverables of the project?
12. Am I responsible for creating, planning, tracking, or managing the project budget?

Not only should you find these things out early help you determine what expectations the business will have of you if you take the assignment, it will also help you get a full scope of the project you are getting yourself into.  By asking simple leading questions such as “I’m not?  Who will be responsible for that?”, you quickly find out a lot about how much the project has been thought about, the real resources available to the project, the organization’s level of commitment to the project, and much more.

All of this should be obvious things that every project manager should know about a given project- but surprisingly, I find many times that project managers do not know all the answers to these questions even after having taken a job and managing a project for months.  Do your homework.  Find out the basic responsibilities withing your project assignments.  Your life will be easier.

As a project manager, ask yourself how much you spend on each of these items:

• Communicating about the project to stakeholders
• Communicating about the project to team members
• Updating your project plan in your project tracking software

Which one of those three do you really think matters to the success of your project?  There’s no question that project tracking software and having an up-to-date project plan is helpful, but it is technically possible to complete an entire project without ever touching it.  You will never succeed without communication, and lots of it.  If you are spending more than 20% of your time on this part of your project, then you’re probably spending too much.  If you’re spending more time on it than this, start examining how you’re using the software and looking for ways to improve your efficiency.  So many times, because project management software is capable of managing so many details for us, we get lost in the details of using it rather than the details of managing the project.  Project management is far more than updating little checkboxes on an electronic checklist.  Get up from your desk, shut off your software, and spend some quality time with your team getting things moving.