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Just What Is A Project Manager?
It’s one of the most difficult jobs to pin down, perhaps that’s why it has so many applicable expletive adjectives attached? Say that 10x.
If we just get the laughing out of the way whenever we usually ask this question in the workplace or on various non-company chat channels¹, and filter out the obligatory and in my opinion totally necessary obscenities, it is actually quite difficult to describe much about them.
What they are, or indeed what they actually do, for the majority if not all of their time they claim on HR’s anachronistic and thoroughly unintuitive time recording system² is beyond all but the most dedicated individuals³.
Project managers, or scrum “masters” as they’re fancifully known as in the agile world, are really just generic management automatons with various laminated certificates in such highly valued fields as “dealing with people”, “adding value”, and the suspiciously common (for some reason) “dealing with conflict resolution”.
They also have a number of copies of various unread⁴ books on agile, motivation, and emotional intelligence (displayed in their cubicle or IKEA bookcase in the background of Teams calls), and a recurring Amazon order for brightly coloured little bits of coloured paper.
