4 Responsibilities of Project Managers

Project Management is one of the key responsibilities in all industries. Different industries give different responsibilities to this title. This article will be on 4 responsibilities of PMs in the software industry.

I’ ve seen many different responsibility definitions for PMs. From my POV none of these are wrong as this is relevant to the culture of the team business management. Everything is fine if the business is moving forward, projects are on schedule and development team is happy :)(This sounds like heaven in the software industry)

We, in Teknodev/DreamHarvesters, give 4 key responsibilities to our PMs;

1. Project structuring
2. Project budget management
3. Risk management
4. Reporting

Let me explain these items in more depth below;

Project Structuring

Every project has its own requirements as well as the team working on the project. The PM must understand these and structure the project so the development process goes as smooth as possible.

The first thing PM must do is to know the team and its members. This is very important as it’s not possible completing a project against its development team. These Qs must be answered:

1. Is this team formed recently or do its members know each other?
2. What methodologies is the team familiar with?
3. Do they understand the PM?
4. What’s the structure of the team? Is it a distributed or centralized team?
5. What tool is the team familiar with?

After answering these Qs, PM will look into the requirements of the project.

1. What kind of methodology is suited better?
2. What kind of issue types might be suited the best?
3. What would be the best workflow for the project?
4. What would be the requirements for the PM tool in this project?

More Qs might be added to these lists. I tried to add the most important ones. The project should be structured based on these Qs.

Project Budget Management

The very purpose of every business is to have profit and grow. This is why there’s always a limited budget for every project. Regardless of how big the budget is, it’s never enough :)

The good news is there’re project managers.

Project Managers are there from the beginning. They should be in the idealization process so they can feed the decision process with a more technical POV. All ideas are exciting and generally tend to get bigger. Project Managers must be aware of that and try to hold the scope in a manageable size.

Once the budget is decided, PMs will continuously follow the project to complete it in the stated budget.

Risk Management

This is a hidden but very important responsibility of PMs. We generally do not think of the risks. Computers can be broken, some people from the team can be got sick, etc. etc.

Project Managers should count these possibilities while planning/analyzing the project. This is important because it’ll affect the budget(both time and finance).

While the project is in development, PM should have B, C, D plans for different situations. It’s very likely coming across unexpected situations. While not being able to plan for them, PMs should be ready for these kinds of situations mentally. That’s how they can deal with unexpected situations.

Regardless of being unexpected or not, PMs should react accordingly in crisis situations.

Reporting

Every business will want to see how the project is going. That’s why this is one of the core responsibilities of PMs.

PMs should understand what reports business require and structure the project according to them. Select tool, setup it and educate the team. Also, it’s required following how the tools are being used.

This allows for preparing the required reports easily then. That’s why PMs should get the reporting requirements from the business units at the beginning of a project and work accordingly.

I tried to outline the major responsibilities of PMs. There’re, of course, might be different responsibilities based on project, company culture, business requirement, market, etc.

These 4 responsibilities will probably satisfy most of the situations tho,

Best.