Intelligent Business

IT projects and Project Management: a fairytale?

Once upon a time, there was Andy, a technical engineer working for many different IT projects. In each of these projects, Andy worked on the functional and technical design of, let’s say, a Business Intelligence solution. His boss and his project managers were highly impressed with his knowledge and the customers were satisfied. One day, Andy’s boss decided to hand out a promotion. Andy was delighted to hear that he / she was going to be a project manager!

At the first day as project manager, Andy could not wait to start the project and become highly successful. But things went differently, Andy was confronted with a team of people that was not motivated at all to participate in the project. He felt that they were even trying to sabotage things! And the users of the new BI solution: they kept changing their requirements and in the User Acceptance Test they did not even see the brilliant technical design that was made by Andy and his new technical engineer. Andy could not cope with all the misunderstandings, the delay that was caused by the lack of motivation of the team members and the dissatisfied faces of his steering committee. With a burn-out and a lot of disappointment, he quit working at his employer.

This story may sound like a sad fairytale, but it is the reality in many IT projects. Since I saw a few cases from nearby, I started thinking about the cause of this situation. The main problem is that project management is seen as a promotion in the organization in comparison to a technical role. In the contrary, it is nothing like that, it is a different discipline! Why do we take extra time for training and knowledge transfer when we switch from Controlling to Marketing in our organization but leave it behind when somebody switches from Programming to Project Management?

Realizing this, it is no wonder that Andy did not immediately succeed in the new role of project manager. It is a different discipline, in which you must be able to work with many different interests and coordinate the work for and within your team. As a project manager, you leave the content of the work (the technical part) behind: you have to keep the overview and make sure that all parties involved will accept the product that your technical engineers are creating.

In many projects I have seen that the project manager was looking too much into the content of the work, since that was his / her old job and focus, and too less at the overall success of the project. This is not necessarily a flaw in the personality or skills of these people, but lack of experience in an entire new line of work. If we want to professionalize IT projects, we need to start realizing that a technical role and the role of project manager are two widely different disciplines. Starting from this idea, you could still ask a brilliant technician to become a project manager, but you have to take into consideration that he or she will need training and will start as a junior project manager (even though he or she may be a senior technical engineer). This means that in the beginning, the new project manager will need coaching and training-on-the-job, as is normal when someone starts a new position.
When I talk to people about this, everybody agrees on the differences between being an engineer and a project manager. Now it’s time to start implementing this difference in our projects in order to make sure that professional IT Project Management is no longer a fairytale but a reality!

Add comment September 15th, 2009