What is a project? According to David Allen, best-selling author of Getting Things Done it’s anything that takes more than one step to complete. For our purposes we’re going to talk about projects that have the following characteristics; they have a business goal, a timeline, a budget (time and/or money), and they require the participation of multiple people to bring them to completion. All of my project management experience revolves around technology projects; the implementation of a new technology, building a new piece of technology, launching a new technology to market, and/or the integration of two technologies.

What is project management? Project management is a role played by an individual whose primary focus is to monitor, track, and manage the individual resources required to meet the project objectives while tracking timelines and budgets. Not all projects warrant a project manager but most technology projects fail without one. People are busy, people get easily distracted, people make promises they don’t keep, and people miss deadlines. None of this behavior is typically malicious or due to laziness, important things come up, life happens, work happens, the project suffers. Without the focus of a project manager projects simply fade away. I have heard this statement so many times, “we started working on this initiative three or four times, then things got busy and we moved onto other priorities.”

When there is a good project manager on the project you aren’t allowed to forget, you are held accountable for commitments, you are asked to give estimates for deliverables (this is where the annoying part comes in). Project managers play the role of keeping the team on schedule, holding people responsible, and helping everyone understand their impact on the overall project. When projects are being properly managed they take on a “boring” momentum; meaning — things are getting done, budgets are being met, and there is very little drama.