The Extreme Project Manager's Role

by Doug DeCarlo, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

In this new world, the extreme project manager is the chief process leader, one who manages the project's context more than its content (the service or product to be produced). This model of the project manager's role has profound implications for what it takes to successfully lead an extreme project in terms of the requisite worldview, management style, and skill set, as well as the project management approach (traditional, agile, or somewhere in between) that's chosen.

The Critical Content Versus Context Distinction

The words "content" and "context" differ by just one letter of the alphabet, yet the discrepancy can spell the difference between success and failure for the extreme project manager.

Projects rarely fail for technical (i.e., content) reasons. What kills projects is the surrounding context, the internal and external environment. In his book Radical Project Management, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Rob Thomsett stresses, "As the rate of technological change increases and the various system development techniques become increasingly complex, it has become difficult, if not impossible, for a project manager to have all the requisite skills to enable him or her to undertake such technical reviews."

The context includes the organizational politics, the business justification for the project, the strength of project sponsorship, expectations of diverse stakeholder groups, and the changing needs of the customer community as well as changes in the external environment. The latter includes changes in government regulations, competitive moves, and dependencies on other projects, to name a few. The context then is all the stuff that surrounds the actual development of the project deliverable -- the weather, if you like.

In contrast to traditional project management, the role of the extreme project manager is not to manage the project's content; managing the content is the role of the technical or development manager. Instead, the role of the extreme project manager is to make it possible for the development or technical team to succeed. To use a farming metaphor, if the project were a flower, the role of the technical or development team is to water and prune the plant. The role of the extreme project manager is to detoxify the surrounding soil.

Meeting the Leadership Challenge: Process Leadership

With little direct authority over people, successful extreme project managers derive their effectiveness from the processes they implement and the relationships they establish.

The successful managers I observed were good process leaders, skilled in group decision making and problem solving, meeting with management, project management, conflict resolution, and negotiation.

Therefore, process skills enable cross-functional, cross-hierarchical teams populated with opinionated people and Newtonian thinkers with conflicting temperaments and interests to join together just long enough to achieve a common goal. Process skills give the team and key stakeholders a sense of purpose, a set of goals, and a pathway to achieve those goals under adverse conditions. They transport people from chaos to clarity, from seeing oneself as irrelevant to experiencing the fulfillment of making a difference. Good process skills can turn conflict into cooperation. Good process is not just a road map to success; it unleashes the energy to pull it off. It excites the project's energy field.

-- Doug DeCarlo, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium