How To Benefit From Running Projects You Know Nothing About

Posted by Rich Crowley in Knowledge Transfer, Project Management

I have heard it suggested that PM’s really don’t need to know much about the essence of a project to manage it. Their role isn’t to be the expert (or anything close to one) but to simply plan and manage the project work towards its ultimate objectives and goals.

I have a problem with this. I have been a PM for enough years to have learned that on projects where I knew very little about the guts of what needed to be accomplished, it was a whole lot more difficult for me to manage, and I was less able to add value, compared to projects where I had a solid understanding of what needed doing. Perhaps this is a PM-style thing and because I’m a very hands-on PM, I feel more troubled about my lack of knowledge than would a peer who is less hands-on. However, I’m even skeptical about that. There’s no substitute for solid knowledge in all roles on a project.

However, sometimes we get thrown into situations where we simply have to make do with limited knowledge. (It’s probably called a personal growth opportunity, right?). I recently completed a project like that. It was quite a frustrating experience for the first part of the project, for both me and the project team members. Normally I operate in a comfort zone where I know when to push for more information or when to rely on less, when to challenge an approach for addressing some problem or when to trust that the team members have it under control. In this case, I was outside that comfort zone and really needed the project team to educate me as the project progressed, both from a technical perspective and a business perspective. I explained to them it was a necessary evil since without some understanding of what they were doing and why, I could neither report progress accurately nor get them help should we need it.

As the project progressed, my knowledge increased enough to help me contribute to the overall success of the project. I was fortunate to have a great team working on the project that had great patience with me in the beginning. As a PM, my learning here was that having project team members educate others as any project progresses is an essential ingredient for organizations to grow. I’m a little impatient at the best of times but will be looking for ways on future projects to somehow build people development into the overall planning process.