Why Projects Require Project Managers

Being a project manager myself, sometime I might think why do projects require project managers as the project managers costs are always considered as overhead. When I think and detail out the responsibilities of the project managers. I can think about these.

1. Managing requirements ( in terms of co-ordination with business teams ) and facilitate business analysts to gather requirements. Trace the requirements to the BA deliverables called functional specification.

2. Estimation based on work breakdown structure / product breakdown structure.

3. Carry on with design phase and facilitate design architects to design the requirements into technical solutoin. Make sure that the design covers all of the business requirements.

4. Capture all the risks which might impact the cost / timelines / resource utilization / customer satisfaction, and assign the weightage, cost impacts, mitigation plan if that happens

5. Day to day coordination with the team and track the progress, issues, assumptions, dependencies.

6. Estimate for build/test phase.

7. Work closely with downstream applications and make sure the impact of the change in the mainstream project communicated properly to them and faciliate impact in the down stream applications.

8. Co-ordinate the system integration / performance testing / user acceptance testing

9. Facilitate the migration activity if any

10. Facilitate with release management in terms of rollout approach.

11. Think about project rollout/implementation strategry i.e., pilot phase, full rollout, phase wise rollout,etc.,

12. Manage resources

13. Manage costs in terms of budget vs actual vs ETC

14. Manage schedule of the project. So broadly if I can classify, we can put it as a) Project co-ordinator b) Project financial controller c) HR manager d) Admin manager Hence considering all such activities and in order to leave the development team to do their work properly, there requires one Full Time Equivalent effort of a person to do all those activities. It has to be a project manager. Do you like to add any further functions of a project manager?

Also Read