The Art of Project Management

1.3. The role of project management

Project management can be a profession, a job, a role, or an activity. Some companies have project managers whose job is to oversee entire 200-person projects. Others use the title for line-level junior managers, each responsible for a small area of a large project. Depending on how an organization is structured, what its culture is, and what the goals of the project are, project management can be an informal role ("it's done by whomever, whenever necessary") or highly defined ("Vincent, Claude, and Raphael are full-time project managers").

In this book, I'll primarily use the phrase project manager, or PM, to refer to whoever is involved in project leadership and management activity. By project management activity I mean leading the team in figuring out what the project is (planning, scheduling, and requirements gathering), shepherding the project through design and development work (communication, decision making, and mid-game strategy), and driving the project through to completion (leadership, crisis management, and end-game strategy).

If this sort of work is structured less formally in your world, just translate project manager or PM to mean "person doing project management tasks, even though it's not her primary job" or "person thinking about the project at large." I've encountered many different ways for these activities to be distributed across teams, and the advice in this book is largely indifferent to them. This book is less about ...