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My Evolving Opinions on Project Management

Creating results in your company takes coordinated effort by a group of people – some would call that a “project”. Project management is the art of keeping all the contributors to the project on task “herding the cats.” This skill set and this role is underappreciated in our industry. When you need to get complex things done with a group of people – you need a project manager to drive the project to successful completion.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

One of the popular questions flying around Silicon Valley for job interviews is; describe one thing that you’ve completely changed your beliefs on in the last few years?

My answer to that question is Project Management.

My old beliefs about project management had very little respect for the role. Most of my interactions with project managers were frustrating; they seem to be wasting people’s time taking notes and scheduling useless meetings. Because they were not contributing to the tasks required to get the project done, I saw them as unnecessary overhead. This view was pretty consistent with most of my consulting customers. On more than one occasion, the addition of a project manager to a project was rejected by the customer as unnecessary overhead.


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About Jennifer Matt

Jennifer Matt is the managing editor of WhatTheyThink’s Print Software section as well as President of Web2Print Experts, Inc. a technology-independent print software consulting firm helping printers with web-to-print and print MIS solutions.

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