What is the job of a Project Manager ?

Many a times I have thought about what exactly is the job of a project manager in software services industry. Almost all the software product development as well as service organization have this as a designation in their organizational hierarchy or as a role in the project teams. Sometimes, the role of a project manager is played by someone who does not have this designation. It is just a functional role. Whatever be it, the question is where does the role description start and where does it end? What is it that a project manager has to do and what is it that he/she is not supposed to do.

I have seen project managers who work  with their team members and help the developers debug their code, review the code, test the code and give functional help. Some also help in gathering requirements and managing requirement, which is mostly the job of a business analyst. However, their core job is to negotiate timelines with sponsor and draw the schedules & dependencies, manage risks, manage client expectation, prepare and control the budget and draw the project plan, allocating work to teams or to members depending on size of the team, participate in reviews, give presentations, manage people, manage team morale, enhance team members’ visibility in the organization, facilitate communication, keeps tab on the quality processes etc etc. They also prepare proposals and sometimes do estimations.

But then, even the project lead and the team (or module) lead also does many of these activities. Also a business analyst also sometimes does many of these things…So where does the role of a PM begin and where does it end? What do you think?

My opinion is that in smaller team size and projects, i.e, less that 12 member team, the job role of a Project manager is very blurred. When the project team size increases, more and more specialists are pulled in and the work gets distributed. That is when the job of the project manager gets defined in a clear cut way.

Some organizations also define a project manager as one who handles multiple projects or sub-projects. So as long as a person is handling only a single project, he is treated as a Project Leader. What are your views on the same?