Hey, I'm on the team too!
I’ve always been told the project manager is an often overlooked component of a successful enterprise project. If you’re a great project manager, you probably tend to appropriately recognize the hard work of your team rather than broadcast your own integral contributions. And this is the exact topic Acquia’s Kieran Lal covered at SandCamp, where he was the keynote speaker. His message called the Drupal community to collectively rise above that trend and, instead, raise the profile of its project managers.
And rightfully so! After all, project managers are charged with a crucial -- and often overlooked -- responsibility of keeping the big picture in mind while simultaneously ensuring that the smallest details are addressed. They need to expertly manage higher-level communications with clients and team members (who, of course, do not always approach challenges and solutions with similar perspectives) while maintaining unfailingly positive energy amid day-to-day, sometimes minute-to-minute challenges.
They’re balancing budgets, allocating time, answering email (probably at any hour), making calls, coordinating busy schedules for meetings, tracking expenses, rearranging resources as needed, often participating in IA and design discussions and delivering a fully baked product -- ideally ahead of schedule and under budget.
You get it. Project managers have a really hard job.
But beyond these important responsibilities, I think the role of project managers and parallel roles like business analysts or solutions architects is especially crucial because they must always consider the client’s business and marketing goals in every single decision they make (or facilitate).
This potentially becomes most apparent in enterprise development, when stakeholders exist across multiple groups such as business, marketing, accounting, sales, public or media relations, technology, and security. Someone responsible for building an infrastructure -- particularly in transitioning clients from the rigidity of proprietary software to the flexibility of open-source platforms like Drupal -- can’t fixate on “making everyone happy.”
But the best project managers are those who can deliver great projects that successfully reinforce the business and marketing goals of the organization. They achieve positive collaboration, facilitate compromises, and maintain forward motion even in large-scale implementations with challenging constraints.
In other words, they help to ensure everyone enjoys the process itself.
Our project managers, business analysts, and solutions architects here at Phase2 are, in my opinion, among the absolute best professionals found in today’s Drupal community. So I’m always proud to work with them on even the most challenging of projects.
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