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A reader was reading Characteristics of Great Project Managers** and asked, "Do you feel that to be a great Project Manager one need not know completely about the technology involved?"

 

No. Project managers need to understand enough about the technology so that they can make tradeoff decisions (or help product owners make tradeoff decisions) about what will actually make it into the release. The more PMs understand the product under development, the better decisions they will make--or guide the project team to better decisions.

 

Here are the two extreme situations I would like to avoid: the un-knowledgeable PM and the PM who would rather be the architect. I've worked with several organizations who thought that PMs in other industries, such as event planning, would make great PMs of software projects. Nope. Not a chance. The PM needs to understand the process of the project. And in addition to the process, understanding enough about the product and the tools can help a PM assess risk and manage it during the project.

 

In my experience, the PM as architect is just as bad. This PM understands the process and the technology and ignores the work of the PM. If the PM is focused on development instead of managing the project, the project suffers as much (although differently) as if the PM was ignorant of the project.

 

So that means I don't have a recipe for how technical the PM needs to be. It depends. It depends on how technical the team is, whether there is an architect, whether anyone else can assess risks, how self-disciplined the team is. The more iterative/incremental development a team does, the more self-organizing the team is, the more the PM can attend to the collaboration skills of the team and the negotiations with the product owners. The more the PM has to drive the project, the more the PM needs to understand the technology.

** Here's my list of necessary skills for great project managers:

Non-technical qualities, preferences, skills

Listening skills. See Hal's last e-tip.

Negotiation skills. PMs need to ask for resources, trade resources and information...

Writing skills. PMs need to be able to write down a plan, so that everyone understands the plan and the tradeoffs

Oriented towards a goal. PMs need to be able to finish a project and keep people focused on the goal

Interested in the people who work on the project. The PM doesn't have to be everyone's friend, but the PM has to be able to see when people are struggling, when something isn't working, as well as when things are working

Able to manage ambiguity -- to live with the ambiguity and make decisions. So far, every project I've managed, not just the software projects, has had periods of ambiguity.

Able to manage the details. Even if the PM isn't a detail person, the PM has to find a way to manage the details.

Ability to steer the project -- to observe the current state, note what's different from where you want the project to be, and the ability to guide the project to the new state

Technical Skills: Functional skills

Understand different lifecycles, and which one(s) is most appropriate to this project

Project scheduling

Task estimation

Risk management

How to deal with configuration management. Hmm, that may be too software-specific. Maybe in more general terms this means dealing with assets, earned value.

Extracting data from the various tools to see where the project is

Other Technical Skills

• PMs don't need to know the details of both the problem to be solved by the project, or how the problem is solved, but without one or the other -- some form of domain knowledge -- the PM doesn't know enough to make good project decisions.
• Either knowledge of a project scheduling tool or an assistant who knows how to use the specific project scheduling tool.

As you can tell, I believe the non-technical, not-easily-assessable skills are most important. And, they're the ones no certification test can adequately examine.