I may not end up being too popular with some organizations on this one, but I think we have situations where we run into worthless project managers. I’m not talking about project managers on the delivery team side of the engagement equation. I’m referring to those ‘figure-head’ project managers put in place on the customer side to ‘do something’ to keep the project moving forward.
Most projects I’ve run have not been this way. Usually, my main point of contact in the customer organization is the project sponsor. This is the person intimately involved in the project on the customer side…involved in all the status calls, the receiver of the weekly revised project schedule and status report and the person who can ‘get things done’ on the customer side. You know who I’m talking about.
But once in a while – and it’s only happened to me a couple of times – the customer organization will feel the need to put a project manager in place to run things on their side. I think it’s a great thing when you’ve run into problems on the project and you’re trying to run through issues, break-fix testing, or whatever, in order to get the solution deployed. That’s not uncommon and can certainly help to get resources in place and that customer PM can serve as a great disseminator of information for the customer team. And that’s not the scenario I’m referring to here. What I’m referring to is a customer PM from beginning to end who is put in place to act as the project manager on the customer side. And for a long-term engagement, a PM on the customer side seems to me like a waste of the customer’s funds and a complete redundancy of effort (at best, and an inhibitor of progress at worst).
When I’ve experienced a project where the customer had a PM on the project from inception to completion, the most they’ve done is take my project schedule, my status report, and my issues and risks and replicated them for their own reporting and disseminated that information in their organization. No value was added and, in fact, the dissemination of key information was slowed in two ways – information and assignments going to members of the customer team AND progress information coming back to me because everything had to go through the customer PM bottleneck. Plus, I still see it as a waste of financial resources on the customer side.