The Good, The Bad, The Ugly- Project Manager

Working in IT industry as a Project Manager,  I do come across my team members praising or complaining about Project Managers as how they have made their easy or hell in the project. Well mostly out of these are the ones who rather complain and seldom do I hear praises for the Project Managers. So is it really that grave of a situation and we can assume that all Project Managers are disciple of Hitler?

Well not so, I think there are 3 categories of PM – Good, Bad and Ugly. They as the name confers may not be like that in reality and it is the perception of the team members against the Project Manager. I know you must be getting confused here, so let’s evaluate each of these characteristics:

1. Good Project Manager – This is one, whom we will associate from the eyes of team members as the one who plans well, approves leaves of teams, takes pain to deliver projects, helpful and sensitive. These characteristics may be helpful in terms of employee satisfaction but they may not be in the eyes of Employer as for them you are too friendly with team and this friendliness removes the fear factor amongst them. With this token- Is Good project manager indeed a bad one, not with the above example. A good project manager is indeed a person who is friendly with the team but not too friendly such that people fear him not and start believing in laissez-faire. A good PM does exemplary work, motivates team/spirit, mitigates risks and issues, meets client expectation and other things that keep project status in Green but what he also does is take corrective actions if things are going haywire, manage people and see their timings in office, have a way to escalate and report if any team member is under-performing or is not adhering to company policies. With doing this what team members have always at the back of their mind is that there is a PM who can heed to their problems/issues at hand but he is also there with a Vulcan eyes who can catch them if they are wrong footed.

2. Bad Project Manager – Now this is the biggest drainer in an organization and this is what one should be careful about. A Bad PM is the one who has limited functional/technical knowledge and even then manages a team of IT developers. This PM will never be able to comprehend the daily nuances of software development. Since he lacks this he will also not be able to identify beforehand the risks and plan to mitigate them.. Read the complete blog at -The Good, The Bad, The Ugly- Project Manager