The Project Manager as Disciplinarian

If your project does not have a strong a central organising individual, it will flounder, atrophy, and then collapse.

A project is a collection of talented individuals from many disciplines, individuals with their own agendas and their own visions and their own priorities. This collection falls down into disorganisation without someone providing the structure for the group to act.

Hence it is critical that the project manager be a disciplinarian.  I mean that in the sense that he or she imposes discipline to the group. 

The PM acts as the catalyst that energises the group.  The PM articulates the single vision of the project, makes everyone turn their heads toward that vision, and makes them march together toward that vision.

The PM must be forceful, not necessarily in the sense of overbearing or overpowering but in the sense of being the force that pushes the project forward day by day, prevailing over forces that will tend to rend the group apart into many directions, and keeps it – herds it - aimed in the right direction.

The Project Manager

Big undertakings involving many individual activities and many individual people need some form of management to organise and direct the works.  Without this management, everything will just sit around and nothing will be accomplished.

What is needed is a project manager.  This  person’s job is to:

• Ensure clarity of purpose – why are we undertaking this project?  What is the vision for the project?  What is it expected to deliver?
• Identify constraints – is there a budget we are aiming for?  Is there a timeframe?
• Determine what needs to be delivered and the activities required – what do we need to deliver to accomplish the purpose of the project?  What activities need to be undertaken to deliver what we need to deliver?
• Determine the dependencies between activities
• Identify what resources are needed to perform the activities – resources include skills, material, equipment, and so on
• Procure the resources
• Plan the activities – generate a work plan that respects the dependencies between tasks, respect the available resources, and when executed deliver the deliverables.  The result is a schedule of work.
• Determine the risks that the project face, and plan countermeasures
• Determine how much the project will cost
• Determine the cash flow requirements of the project – how much does the project need on a monthly basis?
• Execute the plan
• Monitor and control the plan

This list of activities is roughly linear, but they will be performed in an iterative fashion because the activities depend on each other.  The plan determines what resources we need, but what resources are available determine the plan we can have.   The target timeframe determines the schedule of work, but the schedule of work determines the timeframe as well.