The ideal project manager - First Things First

The ideal project manager

By: Ali Mohammad Ali

As a senior architect I am going to assign the characteristics of the ideal project manager,The ideal project manager as I recognize is a person who has the ability of managing a project through its different phases starting from design, planning, construction or production and then final analysis dealing smoothly and professionally with man-power, materials and products either they are software or hardware this leads us to the point of which skills or characteristics he should have in the few coming lines I am going to try ranking those properties of an ideal manager.

I would classify the skills of a manager in two major groups first one includes technical skills and the other one includes managerial skills.

1. Technical skills

This kind of skills in my opinion is very vital for managing any process and to better explain my point of view let us take a construction project for example, if a company is handling a project and assigning a project manager who is suffering lack of technical experience, how can he evaluate his team performance? How hard to him would it be to evaluate and analyze the project situation? Of course he will go to apply the theories of management to the reports delivered to him by his team and this would break the communication chain among the team leading to the trap of throwing the ball over-the-fence (see “History of management” p.02by Prof Vasileios Paklitzoglou)

The moral here is that fair technical background is a must for the following:

• It helps the manager to understand, analyze, and to predict suitable reactions the problems he may face during the time span of his project.
• It enhances communication among his team members.
• It gives the manger the ability of solving unexpected managerial problems rather to effectively interact with those suggestions provide by team members and develop them to applicable ones if they were not.

2- Managerial skills:

Besides the technical background an ideal manager must have a group of managerial characteristics here I am counting some of them:

• Awareness of project management through study and work experience.
• A high standard of communication skills.
• The ability of managing a team.
• He must know how to get each of his team(s) members involved in the real team work environment this can be done along working days and by arranging meeting discussing work status and needs.
• The ability of hearing other opinions and analyzing them and picking what is useful to the job this enhances self confidence of team members.
• The ability of keeping the sky clear in front of all team members regarding the work scopes and responsibilities of each this requires professionalism of data filtering to know who shall know what and when.
• Flexible yet strict personality when dealing with unexpected changes during the time span of the project.
• Enhancing the competition along with coordination among the teams.

Now it’s time to say that while I was writing my essay I was recalling the image of Mr. Mohammad Abdullah the best manager I’ve heard about.