Managers - Match Project Manager to Project Type
Approach to Managing a Project Should be Matched to Type of Project
Dec 24, 2008
Matching the project manager to the project will be helped by consideration of the project manager's core competency. A software project manager's competence is composed of three parts: project management skills, content or subject matter knowledge and behaviours. Many project managers will typically have been skills trained to use a structured project management methodology, including iterative techniques. In addition to those skills they will bring experience and expertise based on their domain or content knowledge, for example industry knowledge about IT, pharmaceuticals, oil or financial services. Finally they will have their behaviour skills and in particular leadership behaviours.
NASA Project Management Conference
The NASA Project Management Challenge 2007 included a speaker named Ralf Mullers whose research was presented in Matching the Project Manager’s Leadership Style to Project Type and noted that competence was always important and leadership style more important on complex projects. His recommendations:
- Recognise types of project
- Assess leadership styles of project managers
- Develop profiles in accordance with project needs
- Differentiate different types of projects in the organization
- Value your project managers
Developing Relevant Project Manager Profiles and Project Types
Developing relevant profiles of project managers is not necessarily straightforward and Ralf Muller used a model based on 15 leadership competences focused on Intellectual [IQ], Managerial [MQ] and Emotional [EQ]. His 19 project types were differentiated by application area, complexity, life-cycle stage, strategic import, culture and type of contract.
Types of Project
The complexity of Muller's approach may be warranted but a simpler starting point for considering project types is to think about a project profile based on:
- Size – budget, time and project team
- Complexity – number of significant relationships and dependencies and business impact [geography, numbers of users, technology, business change]
Project Manager Profile
Similarly a simpler start for the project manager profile:
- Project experience based on size and complexity
- Task focused or people focused in general approach
- Content knowledge – technical, business, geographic…
- Repeated leadership behaviours for example strategic perspective, empowering, achieving, judgement, sensitivity, resilience, influencing…
Project managers typically tend to be either task focused or people focused as a general approach although the more self aware ones can easily operate in both spaces.
Task Focused
- Task focus is good for technical, small to medium projects and with a well defined objective for example an IT infrastructure upgrade.
- Task focused project managers tend not to think of their impact on people or relationships and consequently can be seen to be insensitive or “to not care”.
- Dependent on the people in the project environment this task focus may either help to drive the project through or meet massive resistance.
People Focused
- People focus is good for larger more complex projects with a significant business change involved. This is because stakeholder communication and interaction is very important on large projects and mobilising support, overcoming barriers and passive resistance becomes critical to project success.
- People focused project managers can be seen as too soft and lacking the drive to get things done.
- In addition they tend not to understand technology and consequently their planning and risk management can be naïve.
- There may also be an excessive tendency to defer to the “technical experts”.
Match Project Manager to Project Type
A good starting point to be able to match a project manager to the project type would be for managers to spend some time within their organisation defining how exactly to do that. Perhaps starting with the simpler approach and making it more sophisticated as experience is gained. Matching project managers to project types will help to create a successful project.
