Project Manager: Roles and Responsibilities

Every project, large or small, requires a visionary leader who can consistently keep the richness which is the role of project manager in a team. A project manager not only manages but also arrange project management activities which come under the umbrella of project manager roles and responsibilities. And interestingly it’s a purely strategic role. Because of the success of a project highly depends on the teamwork and the capability of the project manager.

Also from job market outlook, project managers are consistently in high demand. Hence, if you are not open about what is project management and the role of project manager, then it’s time to heads-up.

What is Project Management?

Every business requires project management for a successful result, and it’s nothing but a strategic set of actions which results in certain principles, tools, and techniques to complete the project on time and in the budget.

As per PMBOK guide, project management process includes few various but interlinked steps which are done through the role of a project manager which include:

Initiating: This recognizes the starting of a project and is the first phase of a project. This helps to maintain the team focused on the status of the project and also from the project management aspect helps to measure whether it satisfies the business needs.
Planning: This is the most critical step and includes most of the project manager responsibilities. In this step, a project manager performs the work system for the project which describes the activities to be performed in any phase, cost and timeline estimation, resource planning.
Executing: Execution stage of a project identifies the development, testing, and implementation activities. The role of the project manager here is team building, information distribution and leading the team to carry out the processes. In this step, a project manager performs more of a project coordinator role.
Monitoring and Controlling: In this step the role of project manager is to monitor the project status, recognizing meaningful differences and making needed adjustments to deliver the project as expected by the clients.

However, project management processes do not ever follow a regular pattern as mentioned above and based on business scenarios. Instead, one step can overlap with others. This mostly occurs when things go out of control which is very popular in real life scenarios. Thus, a project manager role becomes very important to manage it and to bring balance in the overall process.

Benefits of Project Management

Project management has several advantages which include:

It defines the project management responsibilities from the start to the end of the project cycle.
It makes projects outcome more expected.
Proper project management releases a significant amount of effort, time, and cost.
As project management follows the status of work, it resolves issues quickly.
The role of the project manager facilitates communication among a team as well as among the team members and client which improves a team’s productivity.
The addition of a new field or user story is only possible through proper project management.
As the team does not need to take overhead on the other aspects of the project they can concentrate on the development-related activities.
It creates project deliverables quality controlled.
It helps in risk analysis and fixes them upfront.
It does project activities collaborative.

Types of Project Management

Project management can be classified into two broad categories where each of the classes has their subcategories based on execution mode.

General Project Management
IT Project Management

Sub categories are as below:

1. General Project Management:

Traditional Project Management
Critical Path Method (CPM)
PERT Network Chart
Adaptive Project Management
Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM)
Extreme Project Management (XPM)
Theory of Constraints
Six Sigma Methodology
PRINCE2 Project Management

2. IT Project Management:

Waterfall Project Management
Agile Project Management
Scrum Project Management
Extreme Programming (XP)
Crystal Methods
Kanban Project Management
Feature Driven Development
Rational Unified Process (RUP)
Joint Application Development

Fundamental Skills for the Role of Project Manager

Project management is a challenging responsibility which needs different skills. A project manager role is not limited to leading a team but also to manage stakeholders, looking into technical and non-technical problems and last but not limited – managing the whole project.

Business and Domain Knowledge: A project manager wants to get included in every stage of discussions from beginning to the finish of a project. Hence, he needs to have any knowledge of the business and domain that the project is all about.
Project Management Knowledge: A project manager should have in-depth knowledge regarding what is project management; otherwise, it is hard for him to boil down the complex situations during project execution.
Technical Knowledge: A project manager does not need to be a tech master, but if he knows the technical sites of the project, that helps him to justify during the project discussion and feasibility analysis. Besides, he must be an outstanding player of making visual presentations through software which are required during the meetings with stakeholders.
People Management Capability: The role of a project manager is like two sides of the coin. He wants to work in favor of both clients and his team; both his parts are integral and essential. So, he must be careful about managing people.

Required Soft Skills for the Project Manager Role

As the project manager manages the team, he is the person who makes the teamwork in his way for the completion of the project, and he requires to have any soft skills.

Here are these Soft Skills for the Project Manager Role:

Leadership: The most important work that a project manager needs is leadership because he not only needs to be useful for monitoring the tasks of the projects all through but also to lead the team and keep them motivated positively.
Team Management: A project manager operates a project administrator role too. He needs to keep things operational. He wants to administer, delegate tasks, set the goals for the team, resolve disputes, and evaluate the performance of individual team members.
Communication: Communication here signifies effective communication. Moreover, unless a project manager communicates, it creates ambiguity among stakeholders, team members, and vendors. The connection is not always verbal, and it could be through file sharing, chat and by other means. Thus a project manager must be well provided and knowledgeable with various project management tools.
Scheduling: One of the significant tasks that come under project manager roles and responsibilities is listing the jobs. This is one of the essential parts of project management, and unless it is a practical one, it is difficult to complete the project on time and within the budget.
Risk Management: Each project has its underlying opportunities which may be associated with each step of a project life cycle and unanticipated during planning. The project manager must be available with a backup plan to handle such risks and should also be capable of analyzing possible risks at some level. Due to its most important, PMBOK considers it as one of the critical knowledge operations for the project managers.
Assigning: This is one sort of conversation skill that every project manager should possess. It is common that customers put ongoing demands within the limited budget and unless a project manager negotiates it diplomatically it creates an issue for the business goal of the organization. This is one kind of conflict management over which can threaten the project unless adequately assigned.
Task Management: In project management, businesses are the weapon over the bedrock of scheduling. So, a project manager needs to be well managed and informed with tools to handle weights of small to big tasks to avoid unexpected complexity that could be increased due to the mismanagement of the project.

Project Manager Roles and Responsibilities

You must have got a summary of the role of the project manager. Not to mention, it includes many activities and is so many projects specific.

In a nutshell project manager roles and responsibilities involve:

Planning and Defining Scope
Task Breakdown and Activity Planning
Sequencing the Tasks
Resource Planning
Scheduling the Tasks
Time Estimation
Cost Estimation
Budgeting
Making SOW and Other Project Management Related Documentation
Preparing Charts for Scheduling
Leading the Team
Risk Analysis
Managing Risks and Resolving Issues
Monitoring Progress of the Tasks
Project Status Report Generation
Conducting Meetings
Partnering with Vendors
Controlling Quality

Final Words

The role of the project manager is not limited but goes through the whole project. All you want to have is enough skills, knowledge, and expertise to perform the role of project manager. To make a successful project management career, a project management certification can also help you prove your skills as a project manager.

If you are interested in seeking project management certifications to hold a good position in the organization, then knowledge on the role of project manager before will help you to understand better on the subject matter. To help you out, Processexam offers online practice test series for the project management certifications.

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