Project Managers with IT service provider - Part II

People related responsibilities include building and nurturing the team, looking into individual career and growth issues and knowledge building and retention. This is one aspect which is absent for a project manager in an end user organization where s/he may be working purely as a vendor manager. Working with a fairly large team reporting into you also calls for a person who has good people skills and knows internal team dynamics.

Delivery related responsibilities include planning and executing the project such that execution happens seamlessly the delivery is smooth. May be some other time I will post a bog on this alone.

Margin related responsibilities include containing the cost of the project for which the project manager should be aware of the cost being incurred and be vigilant enough to identify and bill change requests for any out of scope work that is to be done. This is very critical in fixed bid projects. IT service provider companies are very finicky about costs and idle time. Idle time is watched for like a hawk and no one wants a non-billable resource in their team.

The PM also has to interact with the various other departments in his company like the staffing or sourcing or HR team as it may be called, so as to get resources for his project when required. The PM has to interact with finance team to raise invoice for the work delivered and has to track the payment of the same. These responsibilities may not be there in all companies and may sometimes be shared with the supervisor of the project manager (called the delivery manager).

So, the PM has to be a facilitator and motivator, and a very good leader so that s/he can lead the team members with clarity. 

Thus, in a scale of 1 to 10 in the following parameters: Technical Knowledge, Process orientation, Team management, Cost management and Project management, the typical PM in an IT service set-up would have the following ratings:

Technical Knowledge:    5

Process Orientation:    8

Team management:        8

Cost management:        8

Project management:     8