Selecting Project Managers

How often do we see jobs which require a manager, see the outline for a role that seems perfect and then, in some peculiar arrangement between organisation and recruiter, they add “essential skills and qualifications”. The person appointed for a project management role must be a finance expert, an IT wizard, a qualified accountant; they must have “banking and back office systems experience in major banks or insurance companies”, or some other requirement which at best is helpful and at worst is completely unnecessary.

Having worked in an assortment of companies in which I and other project managers have arrived with diverse experience I can attest to the relevance of project management experience but see the technical aspects as being much less relevant. In a wide variety of roles I had little or no prior experience of the technical aspects of the specific industry – pharmaceutical, utilities, Royal Mail, security for example. The client staff had the experience necessary and we could recruit technical experts if necessary.

For these clients it had become clear that what they needed was support in drawing the various components together to reach their goal. The essential experience brought to the project was in project management. This is a transferable skill. It might be helpful to have some experience of the industry but for any complex project or programme the requirement will be multi-functional, covering the entire supply chain as well as staff and shareholders.

In this situation the key to creating and delivering a project is in ensuring that everyone is striving towards a common goal, and everyone knows their role and responsibilities within an organisation that is designed to reflect the project's goal. An earlier blog discusses project success and what that means.

The key to any project organisation is having the right people with the right skills available, and these are rarely if ever embodied in one person, and especially not in the project manager. I will cover organisation in another blog, but here I set out what I believe is always true: projects must be set up with an organisation that reflects the requirements for the participants to achieve the goal. The person sponsoring the project must know what the goal is and be able to support the project through the acquisition of the necessary resources; the project manager must be able to draw those resources together to deliver the requirement, and the people involved in the wider project team and user groups must be able to create and test the various project outputs. Being a qualified accountant or financial wizard are unnecessary restrictions on the recruitment process. Select a project manager, not a technical expert.