Interesting concept and you’re probably wondering what the heck I mean by this. Usually, there are two extremes of project managers and the obvious middle ground.
The over-involved extreme
The over-involved extreme is the project manager who micro-manage teams on every detail, travel with them to every customer meeting no matter what the topic is or what level of involvement – if any – is needed by the project manager, and feel the need to be involved in every detail of the project.
The under-involved extreme
Then there are those project managers who for whatever reason, always seem to manage from afar. They revise the project schedule and distribute it for viewing using a tool like Seavus’ Project Viewer, they conduct the status calls though they may leave much of the discussion to those who are more active in the solution and daily tasks, and they produce weekly status reports on time…every week. They may have to do this due to their overloaded project schedule or they may choose to do this because they’re lazy…that’s two extremes within an extreme, I guess.
The middle ground PM
And of course….there’s the middle ground. Depending on their project load, this type of PM doesn’t want to manage the team too closely…allowing them professional freedom to do their jobs. The focus is to keep track of the project status, stay well involved but not spend unnecessary PM hours on tasks and meetings better left to the technical team and likewise to not overly involve the technical team in tasks the PM should be handled directly. In both those cases, the object is to not burn through the project hours and budget any faster than you need to.
I’d like to think that I fall in that middle ground. I know I’ve had projects where I’ve had to be part of that over-involved extreme group…when the customer mandated it, or an inexperienced team needed it, or a rogue developer needed monitoring. And I’m certain that I’ve fallen into the under-involved extreme on a few projects as well. Especially when I’ve had six projects to manage and four are currently in critical phases while two are moving very slowly or on autopilot. Those two are going to get much less of my attention and I’ll probably be relying on the project team more on those projects while I stay on top of the other four.