We Need a Project Manager!
I’m willing to wager that most of us have experienced rapid growth in a company we’ve worked for. During stages of rapid growth, we may feel we’re pulled in different directions or we have too many projects. And then, we feel overwhelmed and unable to succeed in our role which often leads us to look for solutions.
Undoubtedly, our quest for solutions brings us to a common corporate buzzword that seems to solve our problems: Project Manager. A project manager seems like a superhero that can save us from our overwhelming project work. Why wouldn’t we be excited? This person has an impressive role description with skills we feel we’re missing. Skills like:
- Team organization
- Create and maintain the scope of work for our projects
- Breakdown overwhelming project work into manageable pieces
- Create a timeline and identify the critical path
- Balance team members’ work load
- Complete projects on time, at or under budget and at the required quality level
Now, we get very excited because this must be the solution. We look for the perfect person with enough experience and a successful project management track record like we read about. Let’s hire a project manager and they’re going to help us turn things around!
Okay, Start Managing Projects!
We find and hire that project manager with all the right experience who seems to fit our culture. Now we feel confident our new team member will help us not feel overwhelmed. And so, they jump right in to manage our projects.
They immediately start setting up all of the structure they used at their last company. They call meetings to start getting status updates on our projects and in those meetings, they use all of those tools, techniques, and methods we read that a Project Manager uses.
Almost certainly, our Project Manager is at “Expert” level in managing projects, and our team is currently at “just get things done” level. What is our project manager even saying? Things like, schedule variance, cost performance index, a WBS, or even task duration.
Our team just completed work in the early days and didn’t use any technical terms or jargon. But now our Project Manager is trying to implement five-plus years of project management experience in a matter of weeks, all the while, our team’s anxiety level goes through the roof. We have to plan work now and not just complete it.
Wait, Why Does it Seem Like it’s Getting Worse?
Hiring a project manager was supposed to be an immediate solution to feeling overwhelmed. Now, we have to quickly learn five-plus years of project management experience and still produce our regular work.
Since we don’t have time to learn new things, we end up putting Band-Aids on our current systems. A common Band-Aid is just hiring more team members to do the extra work. When those team members start, we do our best to relay the tribal knowledge we’ve learned over the years, to teach them the Excel tracking systems we use, and to lead them successfully through our projects.
Meanwhile, our project manager is still trying to track projects using the project management software and structure they built when they first started at our company. There seem to be two or more sources of critical project information, and if we remember the Gossip game from childhood, huge miscommunications are inevitable.
Maybe a Project Manager Wasn’t a Good Idea….
We may start to ask ourselves, “Why does it seem like a Project Manager isn’t working out for us? Project managers worked for other companies; why are we not seeing the same results? In addition, did we hire the wrong Project Manager who really can’t do the job we thought was the solution? Perhaps a project manager doesn’t fit our culture or business model. Maybe we need to go back to the way things were and just keep hiring more team members.”
This scenario may sound familiar and the reason I know it so well is because I’ve experienced it! I’ve worked in three different industries ranging from construction to consumer goods, but all three had similar stories.
These companies were amazing and growing rapidly because they were successful, but they came to a crossroads. So they hired a project manager to improve work flow. They were expecting a project manager to produce results right away as well.
The problem is that a project manager alone is not the best or the quickest way to start moving a company from an early growth stage to the next one. Primarily because a project manager plans future work which puts them at odds with a culture of just getting work done now (often referred to as firefighting tasks).
Therefore, the current culture influences a project manager to manage projects as the culture is now, not what we need it to be. They often get the response, “That’s not how we do it here.” And that is precisely the point. If we do what we’ve always done, we’ll only get what we’ve always gotten.
Let’s go Back to the Drawing Board
Feeling overwhelmed with our projects and tasks was why we hired a project manager in the first place. Now we feel even more overwhelmed because hiring a project manager wasn’t a direct solution and just seemed to complicate work flow. But it’s important to go back to the drawing board to understand why hiring a project manager alone wasn’t enough.
A project manager with experience brings with them a level of excellence, usually in a more established project management culture. The project manager is expecting a team to perform at whatever level of excellence they came from, but our current team doesn’t have that understanding or skill yet.
In my experience, going back to the drawing board has shown me how important it is to set up a project management culture driven by habit. Furthermore, the necessary skills and project management understanding for our team will be established through a cultural shift.
Lesson Learned, We Need a Culture Shift
Each company has a feel or personality of what it’s like to work there. That personality is the company culture and that culture is driven by the behaviors of everyone who works there. If project management wasn’t a part of the culture, it likely won’t be a part of team behaviors either. And so, if we want a culture shift, we have to focus on new project management behaviors.
A cultural shift sets up a structure of roles and responsibilities, proper definition of work, team member accountability matrices, and performance standards for success. As a result, every team member with a role in the project management culture holds themselves to that same cultural standard. This applies to the entire team continuum, from interns, all the way to corporate executives.
As this culture develops, team members begin to take on roles that match their skills and passion. Roles help set up a foundation that a project manager needs to guide teams the way we read about. Undoubtedly, It becomes an investment in a project management culture. The return on investment is getting our products to market faster and with better quality.
At the point where every team member understands their role and how important they are, work begins to flow cohesively. Team members begin to feel confident with themselves and with their teammates because work comes together.
Practice New Habits Leads to Mastery
We started SP Anderson Tech as an agency focused on project management. We designed our agency to help you create a project management office and foundation that focuses on every project team member as an individual first. Then, once team members understand their roles and importance on the team, we can help the team perform together without the need for heavy task management.
We help you create a project management office based on leadership and growth. Our team does this by setting up the cultural standards in four basic areas we outline in our article How to Establish a Simple Project Management System.
We will create your custom Project Management Office plan as our service deliverable. From there, we will collaborate with you and your team to help build new habits to support your plan. Habit drives every culture, so we’ll help you untangle old habits and straighten out new ones.
We will help you lead your company through this process and realize the return on your project management investment. We look forward to collaborating with you! Visit us on our contact page to get started.