A project manager’s task is to induce right people, at the right time to address the right issues and to make the right decision. In a nutshell he is required to plan, monitor and control the project. Broadly, a project manager’s basic skills can be divided into Personal Skills, Technical Skills to understand complexity of the project and apply PM tools knowledge, Management Skills and Coping/interpersonal Skills. We all are aware of the importance of personal, interpersonal and management skills of a project manager. But what about Technical Skills? There are primarily two school of thoughts: Authors like Meredith think that some of the projects are successful because their project managers had technical expertise. While authors like Baca think that a technical project manager tend to focus on technical aspect of the project leaving aside the required management part. A project manager definitely needs technical skill to use different PM tools to plan and monitor the progress of a project. Without technical insight a project manager cannot estimate efforts correctly, cannot schedule dependencies, cannot effective participate in customer meetings and cannot assess the impact of risk appropriately. So, these are the technical skills required besides PM tools usage. A manager who is uncomfortable about the technical environment of a project may overtly depend on the team for all his decisions or may not trust his team at all always feeling that the team is going to misguide him. Both these situations are undesirable. There has been long debate on whether Project managers should be specialists or generalists. The specialists have an edge over the generalists when they can translate the first level of user requirements into technical requirements or when selecting tools during project initiation for example. There are more reasons behind supporting generalists as well because they have a broader based project management skills and can work across silos with plenty of opportunities. James Taylor says that a specialist PM is suited for a relatively simple project. When a project is complex with more sub-systems and inter-related technical platforms, it’s a generalist who succeeds as a PM. Historically, PMs were supposed to have strong technical knowledge. Post 1990 business knowledge was needed along with general technical knowledge. And under present situation business knowledge is primarily needed along with a series of technical knowledge. So, the manager may not have technical “control” over the project but should “understand” the technology.
References
Gillard, S. (2009). Soft Skills and Technical Expertise of Effective Project Managers. Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology, VI, 723-729.
Ranf, D. E. (2011). PROJECT MANAGEMENT. Annales Universitatis Apulensis Series Oeconomica, 13(2), 596-603.
Richard, L. (2010). Must Project Managers Be Technically Savvy? Retrieved from Project Smart ~ Exploring trends and developments in project management today: https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/must-project-managers-be-technically-savvy.php
Taylor, J. (2006). A Survival Guide for Project Managers. New York: AMACOM.
Waxer, C. (2012, May). Specialists vs. generalists. Retrieved from Project Management Institute: http://www.pmi.org/learning/specialists-versus-generalists-4287?id=4287
