Project Manegment in Practice Response

The thing that keeps popping up in definitions of a project manager’s job is that they are responsible for getting things done. Specifically, on a more abstract, organizational level than the developers or other members of their team. Being responsible for getting things done doesn’t mean that they are the ones to actually do those things–instead it means that they are the one’s deciding what needs to be done and figuring out within the organization how they can make it happen. It requires effective communication between their bosses, their team, other teams, etc. It also requires them to understand how a bunch of different pieces fit together and they may have to take on the role of actually putting those pieces together. The most helpful part of this chapter to me was the emphasis that the specific day-to-day role of a PM is different for any company, and different for a PM at the same company at different times. The role is what it needs to be so that a product can actually make it to fruition. I feel like I’m perhaps speaking too much in generalities here, but I don’t think there’s necessarily a more specific way to define the PM role–and isn’t that the point? LeMay’s suggestion to accept that ambiguity, and to get excited about it, really struck me. This is a job about solving, or best responding to, hard, unpredictable problems in a multitude of different aspects.

While I appreciated the candidness of the first section detailing what project management is in theory and what it is in practice, I’d love to ask LeMay how to approach the theory. I certainly don’t think he would try to claim that there is no use in learning about project management in theory, but I wonder if there’s some approach we should take, especially as we are all learning project management in the classroom rather than in practice.

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