Accidental Project Manager – Balancing Art and Science of Project Management
As a Fresh Project Manager
I myself was a perfect example of Accidental Project Manager. I was doing a good job as a technical lead and then I was made into a Project Manager. Luckily for me, I had a good team and the initial projects were relatively less complicated. This helped mask my lack of expertise in Project Management. However, after a few years of enjoying success (mainly because of easy assignments initially), I took on complex projects confident of making them successful. However, I failed miserably. One of the reason for the failure was – I took on too much scope than what I could really handle. After doing 5 Why RCA, the ultimate root cause is "I didn’t know that I didn’t know the art of project management. I only knew the science of it." The situation was so bad that a critical project was about to fail but thankfully my manager jumped in immediately and saved the project. Not everyone will be lucky to have such managers!
With a Salt -N- Pepper Look & Many More Battle Wounds
In a training, I learnt that it is important to understand that Project Management is not just Science, but it is also an Art. Let me explain what this means.
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Science of Project Management. This is the straight-forward aspect like planning, monitoring progress, checking costs, measuring quality of the product through standard metrics, checking progress against scope, reporting status to senior management and so on.
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Art of Project Management. This is mostly to do with interpersonal skills. Leading a project team through chaos, understanding the complex thought processes of key stakeholders and guiding them to work together for a common goal, motivating key stakeholders especially during challenging times, resolving conflicts among team members and so on..
In order to be successful as a project manager, one needs to
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appreciate and acknowledge the fact that there is an "Art" form as well.
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understand the team dynamics
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know what motivates key stakeholders and constantly appreciates good work in public forums
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understand what causes individuals to breakdown OR go into a shell; all efforts need to be spent to avoid these scenarios
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know when to use a carrot and when to use a stick.
These are skills that cannot be provided through training, but through practical experience and mentoring. For you to be successful as a project manager, you need to find a good mentor who can guide you when you face challenging situations.
Finally, it is very important not to react immediately to a situation. Take a step back, think peacefully and then react. I have seen projects failing due to aggressive nature of project managers which breaks relationships and many times this leads to irreversible damage.
Let me leave you with a well known thought. It takes a lot of time to build trust and good relationship, but it takes just one event to break it completely. After that it again takes a lot of time/effort to undo the damage.
Scenario
A typical career path for a project manager is – A technical lead has done a good job and in order to recognize his contributions, he is promoted to the position of a project manager. This is an example of Accidental Project Manager.
These project managers genuinely think that they are doing a perfect job and indeed spend a lot of effort and energy in the project, but most likely they will be considered as a failure in their role of project manager. This leaves them perplexed and wondering – What did I do wrong?