Does the PM have to be a technical expert?

One of our bloggers asked about the level of technical expertise required of project managers.

10 years ago, most organizations felt their project managers had to be the most expert member of the project team. The PMs were the technical gurus and the theory was they would have influence to direct the team due to their technical mastery. This didn't work too well when the team was bigger than 2-3 or when they involved people from non-technical areas who thought the guru was a geek.

This thinking provided a nice career path for subject matter experts but far too often the technical experts wanted to do the technical work of the project. This was just fine on very small projects with one to three people. However, as the size of the project team increased the technical guru had to move into the people management business and deal with other functional areas. Very often the gurus were not too good at cross-functional stuff and did not want to manage people in the first place.

Today, many organizations have suffered through the mis-management and failed projects led by technical gurus. They recognize that project management is a separate set of skills and that a project manager can control a team made up of people who are more technically expert in their disciplines than the PM.

So I'm a strong advocate of having PMs who are expert in managing projects and don't feel they need to know more than everybody on the project team.

Regards,
Dick Billows, PMP
President 4pm.com

The slippery slope

I had an interesting conversation this past week with a new project manager who works for one of our project office clients. Our staff was reviewing newly submitted project plans and found one that was extraordinarily detailed (it may be a new record for micro-management). I called the PM and asked why her work breakdown had so many tasks of such short duration; some as small as one and two hours in durations.

She said, "My boss wants no mistakes on this project and really tight control."

I asked, "But will your team members be submitting twice daily status reports?"

She laughed and said,. "That would be ridiculous; it'll be hard enough getting weekly status information on all these tasks."

I agreed and said, "Then don't you think you're going just a touch too far to have one and two hour tasks that we'll never actually track while they were in-process."

"I guess that's right. But how will people know what to do?," The new PM asked.

What's the answer to her question? Can we save her from micro-management?