Will the real project manager please stand up?
One of the very serious problem plaguing the IT Industry is the lack of “effective” Project Managers. Most of the Project Managers play the role of postman. They forward all the communication from stakeholders to the project team and after getting the responses from the team forward them back to stakeholders. The postmen cause significant damage to the projects and teams they manage. With growing complexity of the projects, rapid pace of development and constant pressure on resources, project teams have very little tolerance to folks who do not add value. Here are signs of ineffective project managers:
- Lack of Ownership: Ineffective project managers don’t take ownership of a project or commit to seeing it through to successful completion. They fail to anticipate risks and fail to act in time when there are deviations from the project plan. They also fail to understand and establish a clear success criteria for the project.
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While I agree on many points in your article like, Lack of Ownership, Poor Communication, Poor Planning, Failure to anticipate risks, Lack of Knowledge are all the very common issues.
We have this because we promote or on-board engineers and forget to train them. It is a necessary evil but this is necessary. Also it is a fact that the organizations are not serious about training.
Other reasons that I would like to add are
In many organizations the role definition is not clear.
The KRAs are not aligned to the project parameters.
We pass on responsibilities to the PM but not the authorities.
Lack of frequent training programs
Expectations are not clearly communicated
Lack of support system
Regards
Many thanks for the feedback MuraliShyam. You are right about “How incompetent project managers are created?”. This is the title of my forthcoming post. I wanted to focus on the symptoms in the current post.
Thanks a lot for a nice articles.