Project Management

Project managers are often key drivers behind any successful service or project development. However, many senior managers have acknowledged the most ad hoc manner in which the project managers acquire their skills but they are not sure of how to develop and improve the supply of well-trained project leaders for the future.  There have been a lot of research that has been done on how to better the process of project management but less is known about the skills types and challenges that would characterize a project manager. Managing projects is an inimitable challenge that necessitates a strategy and methodology all on its own.

It requires the project managers to be ready to function as leaders in every aspect of the term. Other than charting the appropriate course, they must provide the means, support, the confidence and motivation for their teams to achieve the set goals of their projects. In the world today, projects and their management is crucial due to the need to keep on innovating and meeting the ever changing needs of the market. Therefore, project management is a crucial and important tool in an organization that understands it well. The project managers operate more as facilitators, team members and cheerleaders. The project mangers, therefore, hold unique and precarious positions with little authority and forced to operate beyond the traditional hierarchy of the organization. They are said to be the boss but it is defined in a loosely way thus making them a kingpin but not a king. In other firms they may lack the authority to conduct performance appraisals, offer rewards and incentives to their subordinates. This makes their style of management to be of persuasion and influence than compulsion and command. Due to these and other limitations, they are said to be accidental professionals.

There are a few formal or systematic programs that exist for identifying and training project managers even within the institutions that specialize in project management. This results to failing to get the skills that he project managers may need to succeed thus most project managers get into their responsibilities through coincidence than by calculation.  There are also few people who grow to become a project manager since it is not well-defined or understood path of career within most of the organizations. Therefore, the position is lunged upon people rather than being sought by them. Many project managers have had vast challenging experience in organizations. They are constrained to specific timeframes to complete a project, performance of set characteristics and a budget. Those who are quick to comprehend the nature of their myriad duties succeeds while those who do not fail. Most of the project managers learn their duties the experience in a trial and error manner either by stumbling from one duty to another or by failing completely. They are faced with battling entrenched bureaucracy and mighty functions, opportunities of markets, funds and other resources that are irretrievably lost to the economy.

Most of the project managers do not understand the challenges in becoming  effective in management of project in organizations thus being difficult. Projects are exceptional organizational work that is used in developing new products or services in the company that it may succeed in or not. They, therefore, force the managers to operate outside the traditional functional authority lone and rely upon other informal power methods. This environment that the managers operate in adds the extra dimension of difficulty. This is because the projects represent change that threatens the status rather than supporting it. This forces the managers to be extremely vigilante to the monumental nature of task they are to face.

Project management is an act of balancing that requires the managers to manage several conflicting demands of various stakeholders.  In other instances when there are important clients the number of the involved stakeholders may be too large. This poses a threat to the success of the project. The project manager at times is in dilemma on how to manage the stakeholders’ demands since it is normal to find that when one is happy the other could not be, thus the project managers must find ways of keeping up the satisfactory relations that would allow minimum interference.

Q2

Most corporations do not understand particular challenges that the project management presents thus making the effectiveness of the project manager difficult.  This is because projects are unique form of the organizational work with critical role in the organizations. This implies that they are like a mechanism to introduce new products and services that would bring on board interorganizational efficiency that most company seek but fail to get.

Project management requires managers to attend to a number of conflicting demands of the powerful stakeholders since it is an act of balancing. This makes it important for the project manager to identify and assess the principal stakeholders early into the project and know their objectives. It is also important for the project managers to foster good relations with the stakeholders to minimize their effect. This makes the project manager to maintain a satisfactory relationship with the stakeholders thus ensuring that the work is done without interference.

It is very clear that the project manager is a “leader intensive” task. Therefore, the project manager should be strong and effective for him or her to help the project succeed even in the uphill of external stakeholders or hiccups. Poor leadership would waste many opportunities of making a project successful. The project manager should be the focal point of the projects since they are the rallying point for the teams and the major source of information and communication to the stakeholders.  Leadership in project management should be flexible since different subordinates or circumstances call for different response in that it should be self-defeating to tailor the situation to the best appropriate approach. Through this, the project managers knowledge their limitations and work through the strength of the subordinates to perform certain tasks of the project. This would force the project manger to know where to seek help and how to ask the right questions. The project manager should dire.............