Occasional Project Manager. Is it possible to become a project manager by chance?

At one point, the chef approached you, noted your organizational skills and offered to lead a group of colleagues (team) to implement a new project. How can this change your life?

Why did this happen and why do we need a project manager or a project manager? Someone in the company had an idea, having realized which, it is possible to achieve improvements in the work of the company or get a direct income. The implementation of this idea does not fit into the framework of normal operating activities (for various reasons). Further, at one of the meetings at which your boss was present, the idea was supported by the leadership and its implementation was entrusted to your boss, since he either was its initiator, or thematically the implementation of this idea was closest to his area of ​​responsibility. At the same time, the implementation of the idea requires the diversion of at least several employees from the duties prescribed in their job descriptions (in non-project organizations, participation in projects is often not included in the duties), that is, the volume and complexity of the work is too large to entrust its implementation to one or even several employees of one department either require experience, knowledge and skills that nobody in the company possesses, or both. Therefore, to implement this idea, you must run a separate project.

Why should your boss not become the leader of this project? For his part, the situation may look like this. The idea that he needs to implement requires planning, coordinating the actions of at least a few people, monitoring the results of their work, a separate budget and its control, and, most importantly, time that the boss may simply not have because of the workload within the current management operating activities. In this situation, it is quite logical to use one of the management methods - the delegation of responsibility for this result. One of the basic principles of project management is personal responsibility for a very specific result. Therefore, in such a situation, it would be quite logical to appoint one of his subordinates to be responsible, who should have several important qualities. Firstly, by those very organizational skills, and secondly, by understanding what needs to be done to achieve a given result, including the ability to draw up a plan for the implementation of the project. That is, so to speak, a minimum.
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Delegating responsibility for the result to you as the project manager does not remove the final responsibility from your boss to the supervisor who entrusted him with the implementation of the idea, but will reduce personally the time spent on achieving a specific result. Do not forget about it, understanding this fact will help you when in the course of the project implementation problems arise and you need help (but about this in another article).

The very first thing you encounter will be the need to spend a significant portion of your working time on planning the work of all project team members, especially if this team consists of employees from different departments and / or external contractors are needed. The second important point is that the result of the work of the whole team the chief will ask from you, for this he, in the end, appointed you as the project manager. The third important point is that, most likely, the chief will ask you exactly the result, including intermediate results, and not control the process of achieving the result, because he appointed you to supervise the execution of the work necessary to get the result. At the same time, he himself becomes the curator of the project.

And when an understanding of all these moments comes to the newly created project manager, he sometimes has a certain “crisis of responsibility”. On the one hand, the result of a project is almost always formulated in such a way that the newly created project manager does not seem to have to answer for it, based on what is described in his official duties. On the other hand, bonuses for achieving a project result can often be an additional financial bonus and / or a possible increase. And the very opportunity to try on a "jacket manager" can also be interesting. Therefore, it is very important at the start of the project to agree with the chief on the limits of your “managerial independence”, even if the chief himself did not insist on it. For example, the current deviation in terms of execution for one to two or three days does not require you to immediately escalate (official notification) of this situation to the chief, of course, provided that you yourself know how to eliminate the lag in the future. And the identification of a longer lag, you need to escalate. A similar story with possible deviations in the cost and volume of work performed by the contractor under the contract. And although the majority of contract work in Russia is carried out under contracts with a fixed price and a fixed amount of work, not all and not always go as it is written in the contract.

Projects can be of various durations, from several weeks or months to several years. How can the duration of participation in the project affect you personally if you first became a project manager? Strange as it may sound, but not all people working in companies tend to become leaders. If the project is short in duration (several weeks or months), then you will undoubtedly gain useful experience in managing and organizing the work of other people, which will allow you to take a fresh look at your place in the company and spur your ambitions. If the project is quite long (usually, much more than a year), then, apart from the above, you unexpectedly may encounter an interesting effect. Working as a project manager, you, by developing your management skills, with a certain probability “dull” the skills that you have honed, being a subject specialist. Therefore, if you have chosen the role of a project manager without first deciding for yourself whether you are going to retrain as a manager in the future, then consider that returning to your previous job may be accompanied by additional efforts to restore partially lost qualifications. But isn't the realization of the success of your first project worth all the effort spent on this?

Good luck to you in project management and the conquest of corporate Olympus!
Author: Oleg Tumasov, Chief Editor of Project Management magazine.