A project manager acts as the primary link between business and technical teams. A project manager is responsible for maintaining the project schedule, developing project estimates, working with external teams and tracking project issues. The project manager belongs to either the technical team or the project management office (PMO). The project manager works with business teams, technical teams, business counterparts, testing resources, vendors and infrastructure teams.

A project manager is often challenged with diagonally opposite views from the business side and technical side. A project manager’s success depends on balancing the needs and emotions of both sides.

Understanding the Requirements
A project manager must familiarize with the project’s requirements as defined by the business or product managers. This will help you understand the business vision behind the project. You will need this knowledge while negotiating with the technical teams.

Understanding the Technical Landscape
A project manager must also understand the technical systems, resource skills and infrastructure capabilities available for the project. Business teams come up with expectations that are sometimes beyond the capabilities of the technology team. It is the responsibility of the project manager to understand the technical capabilities available to the project.

Walkthrough of Business Requirements
This is a critical step in the project delivery process. The project manager must invite members from the business team, technical team, testing team, infrastructure team and vendors. The project manager must encourage the various stakeholders to ask questions about the requirements. Any prototypes available must be demonstrated in this meeting. The project manager must find answers to all questions resulting from the requirements walkthrough. The project manager must get the final version of the requirements approved by all stakeholders.

Managing Conflicts in Timelines and Budgets
All project managers will face the conflicts arising from shortened timelines and limited budgets. Business teams typically demand many features that are nearly impossible to deliver within short timeframes. The project manager must work with business and technical teams to prioritize the requirements. If the project is executed in a product development organization, then the project manager could utilize agile methodologies to deliver projects incrementally. In this case, the project manager may be required to act as a scrum master to facilitate scrum meetings between various stakeholders.

The Art of Saying “No”
As a project manager, you may be forced to say “no” to demands from both business and technology teams. However, it is important to create a win-win situation for all parties when you are faced with conflicting demands. You can work with the stakeholders individually before bringing all parties together. Most stakeholders prefer to work together. The success of a project manager depends on how effectively he or she can bring out the best in everyone, driving everyone towards a common goal.

Finally, the job of a project manager is not to satisfy the demands from all corners. The project manager must identify the essential deliverables that will meet the business needs, with a solid understanding of what is possible within the limits of technology.

Related:

Smart Project Management: Best Practices of Good Managers

Is Agism an Issue in IT?

1. The IRS is enabling taxpayers to download their tax transcripts over the internet from the Internal Revenue Service. The official secure URL for the transcripts download followed immediately after The White House fact sheet confirmed the decision. According to the Tech Crunch You Can Now Download Your Tax Returns From The IRS  article, there are some minor bug issues when registering. Given that security has long been problematic with the IRS, the best course of action for the public is to take some precautions when downloading personal information on mobile devices, pc’s and laptops. Installing disk encryption software on all your devices will protect your files reduce risk
2. Have an awesome Start-Up with products in ‘stealth or private beta” that you want like to pitch for a chance to get a table at Disrupt NY? TechCrunch is heading to Atlanta and New Orleans February 18^th and 20^th 2014 and will host a beer fest night in exchange for your thoughts and pitches. Tickets are $5, and all entrepreneurs, investors, dreamers or tech enthusiast are welcome.
3. Cloutex, a cloud computing future enabler has just secured their first round of seed funding.  Cloutex is an Estonian tech startup, which connects and syncs various web applications such as e-marketing, CRM and accounting tools under one convenient hub. The United Partners, SmartCap and EstBan business angels seeded the start-up with $6000, 000.
4. Could you get everything important that you need to know about living successfully from a computer program? Ryan Dube seems to think so. In his 6 Life Habits That Programming Could Teach You Today  he speaks in flow charts, loops and program modules, in the same breath as paying off debt or buying a house.  How can your programming skills help in life skills by modeling some of the same principles?
5. 10 Incredibly Simple Things You Can Do To Protect Your PrivacyPassword protect your devices.  Put alerts on your name in Google; simple tasks that can be significant in protecting your privacy.
6. Adobe Brings 3D Printing Support to PhotoshopAmong the latest updates in Adobe, Photoshop users have the ability to design 3D models from scratch as well as being able to toy around with color, shape and angles.

Before we go to the list do you know what makes software skills most sought-after and hence more valuable than most of the other job skills? It is simply because unlike any other skill, software skills are global and are not at all location specific! With the evolution and penetration of internet technologies, the physical distance between the client and service provider hardly matters. So, with more advancement in technology, it is indeed going to rain opportunities on the right skilled developer. I’ll take the liberty to reproduce the following quotes here to prove my claims statistically:

Demand for “cloud-ready” IT workers will grow by 26 percent annually through 2015, with as many as 7 million cloud-related jobs available worldwide.

---IDC White Paper (November 2012).

In the United States, the IT sector is experiencing modest growth of IT jobs in general, with the average growth in IT employment between 1.1 and 2.7 percent per year through 2020.

---U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There are normally two sides to the story when it comes to employment. On one hand, employers hold the view that the right candidate is a hard find; while on the other, job hunters think that it’s a tasking affair to land a decent job out there.

Regardless of which side of the divide you lay, landing good work or workers is a tedious endeavor. For those looking to hire, a single job opening could attract hundreds or thousands of applicants. Sifting through the lot in hope of finding the right fit is no doubt time consuming. Conversely, a job seeker may hold the opinion that he or she is submitting resumes into the big black hole of the Internet, never really anticipating a response, but nevertheless sending them out rather than sit back doing nothing.

A recruitment agency normally keeps an internal database of applicants and resumes for current and future opportunities. They first do a database search to try and identify qualified and screened candidates from their existing crop of talent. Most often the case, they’ll also post open positions online through industry websites and job boards so as to net other possible applicants.

When it comes to IT staffing needs, HR managers even find a more challenging process in their hands. This is because the IT department is one of the most sensitive in any given organization where a single slip-up could be disastrous for the company (think data security, think finances when the IT guys are working in tandem with accounts). You get the picture, right?