Good PM 5 – Relate to the technical issues of the solution

Posted: February 4th, 2009 | Tags: personal network, Project Management, Project Manager skills, technical understanding | No Comments »

“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.“

— Albert Einstein

Rather than getting in to the age-old discussion about functional skills makes a good/bad project manager, let’s rather think about the benefits that a PM with understanding of the solution will have.  (Most of my PM experience has been in the IT systems environment and this may taint my view a bit.) I do not support the idea that a good PM must be a functional expert, but I do suggest that the PM needs to understand the solution that his/her project will deliver. This normally means you need to get into the technical jargon of the subject area.  How deep this knowledge must be is a question that does not have a single answer.  The “it depends” type of answer should be given here. Rather than being a functional expert, I support the recommendation that the PM needs to be a quick and eager learner. Do you know how to learn?  Are you open to be taught?

What benefit will you get out of understanding the technical issues:

• A better understanding of your scope boundaries.  What is a new requirement and what is a clearer definition of an existing requirement? Do you understand if the proposed solution the technical wiz kid has just come up with is small alteration in approach or is it a new solution with it’s own set of problems?
• One of the trouble areas of any project is the accuracy of effort estimations.  PMI recommends several techniques that you could use to validate the estimations via experts but I think the PM should be able at least sanity check these.  This knowledge should normally be restricted to “rough order of magnitude” type estimations.
• Do you understand the progress that the resources are making? So many tasks ends up with the 90% done status! It is the PM’s responsibility to understand what is holding up a specific task, what is causing delays etc and a technical understanding of these helps you to foresee the next challenge that you are most likely to face.  For some reason a lot of functional experts only warn you about problems once it hits them! It is nice to be able to discuss the next step/challenge/risk before it hits the issues list!
• Once these items do hit the issues list they need to be prioritized.  This is a step where cause and efffect knowledge always helps you to identify that one roadblock that is holding up several tasks or is the root cause of severla issues.
  

I am sure that most experienced PMs can add to this basic list of mine. I think the key here is that you must follow the good advice from Ronald Reagan – “trust but validate”.  You can do this in one of two ways, technical understanding or a network of subject matter experts (SME).  My ideal solution is not either-or but both. Understand what is happening yourself and when in doubt use your network of SMEs. This emphasizes the need for a personal network that is well managed.

Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation. It is better be alone than in bad company.

George Washington

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