So, You Want To Be A Project Manager?

You’re not alone. The past few years have seen an explosive growth of new PMP (Project Management Professional) certifications. According to Allan Hoffman at Monster.com, there are now about 181,000 certified PMPs, 12,000 of them in IT.

I’ve lost count of all the developers, testers, and even product managers at my company who have asked my advice on how to make the switch to a technology project management career. Outside of work I get these questions as well. One oblivious friend of mine actually lectured me on how easy the job must be, since all PMs seem to do is make schedules and set up meetings.

Really? Who knew.

I’ve been an Information Technology project manager for twelve years. I work at a large corporation in the San Francisco Bay Area which I’ll keep anonymous for obvious reasons. In 2001 I earned my PMP and two years ago I completed my MBA. As a director-level PM in my current organization I’ve managed projects with budgets up to $17 million, usually several at a time.

I like my job, and here’s why:

• The constant variety. No two days at work are the same. Rarely are any two projects the same, at least in my world.

• The mix of left and right brained skills required. Emotional intelligence and savvy negotiation ability are as important as your capacity for financial and technical analysis.

• A sense of completion and accomplishment. Once your project is wrapped and your customer is happily using their new application, network or hardware, it’s a great feeling. For operational managers, such moments can be rare (trust me on this, I used to manage an accounting department.) A project manager in my company closes a project every six to twelve months.

• Education. Every day at work is like being in technology school. Projects are fantastic opportunities to learn through osmosis. It’s unavoidable. As an undergraduate liberal arts major, I never took a single programming class, but today I can actually have an intelligent conversation about data warehouse architecture or middleware configuration or business intelligence system design. Who would have thought?

• (I’m also fortunate to work with people I like, and a boss who trusts me to get things done. These two factors certainly make life much easier.)

But as to my friend’s comment about project management being a picnic, I respectfully disagree. For starters,

• You have Responsibility without Authority. In a matrix organization, which most big corporations seem to embrace, a project manager doesn’t have any direct reports. People are “borrowed” from other departments (development, QA, documentation, hardware, etc.) for the duration of the effort. They may be working on several project simultaneously, and you may find yourself horse trading with their manager for their time. The loyalty of your project team could be stretched in a half dozen different directions.

• You’d better enjoy being a control freak. If the guy in Singapore who was supposed to test the firewall ports for your server never followed through, look in the mirror if you want to blame someone. You should have known to have someone follow up on HIM.

• IT PM’s spend a big chunk of time firefighting. Especially when you’re working with new technology, be prepared for thorny system issues that have your developers scratching their heads while the customer screams about the delays. You better have the salesmanship (and internal network) to escalate these issues quickly and get enough resources on the problem.

• In many organizations with a mature PM structure, management puts as much stress on complying with paperwork and methodology as on successful project delivery. You’d best make sure your presentations are formatted correctly, that the right documents are in the right folder in your sharepoint directory, that customer signoffs are property documented. If all this sounds too trivial, controlling or exasperating for you, then you might want to consider another line of work.

• Scope creep, shrinking budgets, resource contention … the bread and butter of a PM’s day. Especially in this fun era of layoffs and cutbacks.

That’s just a taste of it. The purpose of this blog is to give those of you who are considering making the switch to a project management career some insider advice about life in the PM trenches. So we’ll dive deeper into these issues and more in posts to come. Feel free to email me with questions or topics and I’ll be glad to give you my perspective.

IT project management can be an immensely rewarding career if you have the right mindset and are well prepared for the inevitable headaches. Hopefully I can help you decide if it’s the right career for you.