The Value of a Good Programme Manager

At Allan|Carter we work with many of the leading Systems Integration companies within the Communications Technology sector, identifying and selecting client principals, consultants and programme managers. Recruiting good project managers is tantamount to the continued success of our clients and over the years we have developed an innate understanding of the difficulties of successfully measuring the soft skills involved.

In this article, Caroline Macdonald, Resource & Programme Manager with global integration company Northrop Grumman, comments on some of these challenges.

I still have a coffee mug, presented to the participants of a project management training course I attended early in my career, with “Project Management makes it happen” on the front. I’ve always felt there should have been an exclamation mark at the end of that phrase as it is a bold, in your face, kind of a statement. It reflected the enthusiasm I felt then, and still feel today, for project management. We’re the guys to make it all right on the night!

So what makes a good project manager? Is it someone who is a whiz with charts and reports or who can get all the links right in a complex Microsoft Project schedule? Good project management needs space for thinking time and that’s hard when you’re concentrated on inputting the detail of the project schedule. Make sure you have enough support on the team to help with this.

Knowing the health of the project in terms of progress achieved, and time and money spent, is absolutely essential. This requires a disciplined approach: using Work Breakdown Structures to agree defined areas of responsibility and associated tasks; Product Descriptions for the resulting deliverables; regular reviews of progress against the schedule and budget with all variances understood; review and update of the risks and issues logs; plus implementation of the risk mitigation actions. But all this is just the starting point.

Now here comes the important ingredient …gut feel. Honestly! OK, call it ‘experience’ if that feels more professional. My experience tells me that if it doesn’t feel right, then it probably isn’t right and you need to dig a little deeper to find out what’s wrong. We’ve all had events that haven’t gone as smoothly as we’d planned but when you look back, you probably did have a niggling feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Maybe you didn’t have time to stop and look or you didn’t want to look closer as there wasn’t time to deal with what you might find. Funny, there’s always time to put things right after they’ve gone wrong! I’ve learnt that you ignore your gut feel at your peril.
How does the good project manager use this gut feel on a day-to-day basis? It’s basically an early indicator of potential trouble ahead. It might indicate that a team member hasn’t thought through his or her plan of action, has not validated an underlying assumption, or has failed to take account of the significance of interdependencies, particularly on other people.

At its most basic level, it identifies what might occur to prevent success being achieved. Sounds familiar? This is how we identify the risks and issues on the project and decide what to do about them. Much attention is given to the analysis of risks once they have been identified. But how do you know you have got them all? If you haven’t identified a risk, you can’t even start to mitigate against its impact. Risks can come from all stakeholders: customers; your suppliers; your team; your management; and the numerous other parties who could be affected by your project’s activities and products. You need to see the world from each of their viewpoints to imagine what could cause the project to go off track and threaten its success.

Stepping into someone else’s shoes for a few minutes to see what the world looks like from there is also an important element of building strong relationships. It increases the likelihood of finding common ground with your stakeholders, to your mutual advantage, possibly opening doors to further opportunities. People tend to want to do more work with people they like working with.

So what is project management all about? It’s about:

A project with increased likelihood of being delivered on time and within budget, less likely to have nasty surprises along the way hence lower risk.

Reduced need for management attention to be focussed on ‘problem’ project allowing management to focus on the strategic vision and building the business.

A happy customer who has received the actual benefits extolled in the business case for the project.

And a happy project team who can spend their weekends with their family instead of fire-fighting ‘unexpected’ problems.

About the author – Caroline Macdonald is Resource & Programme Manager at Northrop Grumman, a global technology systems integrator. She is a certified PRINCE2 Practitioner and member of both the APM and PMI.

 

About Allan|Carter:
Allan|Carter is a niche recruitment partner for high-growth businesses in the Communications Technology sector, across EMEA. Our clients include the software, hardware, services and service provider communities. Allan|Carter has successfully delivered for many of the industry’s leading companies, including HP, Juniper Networks, Thus, Intel, Fujitsu, BlackBerry and IBM. Our fast, cost-effective recruitment solutions, as well as our focus on this market, has established us as a leading company in our field.

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