Page 78 - DMGT521_PROJECT_MANAGEMENT

Unit 5: Functions of a Project Manager

subsidiary company that will employ, say, 100 people would you choose a fairly junior manager Notes
with no experience of company set up who you don’t even know and you don’t even bother to
interview to set that new company up for you?
And yet executives have been known to entrust the management of large IT projects – even
projects with the potential to break the company - to junior managers who have no demonstrated
ability to perform the task. And when was the last time you heard of a project board putting
candidate project managers through a rigorous interviewing and selection process?

5.5.1 Project Organisation Chart

Why don’t they? Well, if they want a Managing Director to set up a new subsidiary they know
what questions to ask them; they know what they looking for; the new MD will be someone like
them. But a project manager? They wouldn’t know what to ask or what to look for. Anyway,
surely anyone can manage a project?
And if you were setting up that new subsidiary would you pick someone whose only qualification
was that they had been on a 5 day business management course and had a certificate to prove it?
But he’s done a 5 day project management course and got a certificate? Give him the job!

We read in the press about major companies that have significant and costly business problems
because new IT systems don’t work properly. The public sector has its own horror stories too.
There are, as always, many causes for such problems but amongst them will be a lack of a proper
project organisation, symptomatic of which are comments such as these from senior executives:
1. “the project is being done for us by the software house”
2. “the IT Director’s in charge - isn’t he?”

3. “the project manager? Some guy from IT, I think.”
4. “we don’t need a project manager - the software house is managing it for us.”
5. “my responsibilities? How do you mean?”

6. “dedicate our people to the project? Why do you think we employed the software house?“
Project Organisation chart starts at the top. That is, the top of the company. If the Chief Executive
does not hold anyone responsible for the project not only will a key - the key - accountability be
missing, but accountability will probably not be assigned further down the project organisation
hierarchy.
This course therefore covers not just the things that the project manager and team members
should do and be accountable for. It starts at the top and addresses how to get proper
accountability established at company board level and how this should be propagated down
through the project organisation. And how the same kind of thought processes that would go
into setting up the organisation of a new company should go into the setting up of a large
project.
The course covers the things that each person in the project organisation should be accountable
for and then goes on to examine the practicalities - the mechanics - of how they should do things
like risk management, estimating, planning, reporting and a host of other things.

Notes Project organisation can be of the types listed as: functional, product line, geographical
location, production process, types of customer, etc.

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