A Day in Life of a Project Manager

Case Study

Introduction

There is always difficulty in choosing a suitable workplace, not only does the job need to
be right for you, but company culture is just as important.One of the benefit in working for a
company is that you’ll get to know everyone, including the leadership team. Your
responsibilities goes along with your position and will often stretch outside of those in your job
description. Even your day-to-day life will often be repetitive and sometimes quite varied.

Working on a business, there are chances that you will actively participate within your
company’s management structure. You might even be assigned in a managerial position.
When entering a management position, the responsibilities attached to you includes the daily
operations by ensuring the daily functioning of a department or group of employees. She is
also in-charge to set goals to ensure a company’s longevity. Other than that, she also has to
motivate and create an environment where employees thrive. She also has to set evaluations
and encourage satisfactory work and employee performance.

Background Information

Rachel is the project manager of a large information systems project. She arrives at her
office early to get caught up with work before her co- workers and project team arrive. It takes
Rachel 10 minutes to get to her office and settle in. She always have a busy schedule ahead
who still manages to have quick conversations with her co-workers.

She usually gets several phone messages, e-mails, and notes on her desk in which she
spends 15 minutes reviewing her schedule and “ to do” lists for the day before responding to
messages that require immediate attention. She usually has lots on her schedule including
meetings and work follow ups. She is also very conversant to her workmates and especially
spend minutes of her time to chat with them.

Problem Statement

The problem identified in the given scenarios is that she has no time management and
low productivity rate resulting to no accomplished task during the day. She does multitasking
and doesn’t delegate the work to her team. Based on the narrative, one factor that affects the
performance of Rachel as a manager is the work attitude of her staff. They are not efficient at
work and has no time consciousness like for example during a meeting that has to start late
because the attendees are not yet present. She is also distracted in her work and oftentimes
gets interrupted. She still have time for activities and conversations that doesn’t involve work.
Because of poor time management, so many work concerns piled up and not being resolved.
 Alternatives

Project Managers play the lead role in planning, executing, monitoring, controlling and
closing projects. They are accountable for the entire project scope, project team, resources
and success or failure of the project.

If the cause of the problem is the shortage of qualified project personnel needed to
complete projects, it is revealed that the problem may require project managers to addressing
such issues entails: (a) proper planning, (b) project management training, and (c) engaging
staff to work efficiently.

Proper planning allows teams to ensure that risks can be mitigated against and that
smaller tasks roll-up into milestones that meet with the larger goals of the project, reducing
potential risks. Project managers need to engage in proper project planing so the project is
adequately staffed, so that it supports timely delivery.

Project management training will also enhanced the skills and knowledge of the
employees. It will teach the importance of time and setting of goals and objectives. You will
learn how to produce documents for review and you can work better with information systems.

Lastly is engaging the staff to work efficiently. There should be proper delegation to the
staff that even without the manager, they should be able to achieve the tasks given to them at
a specific timeline. They should stop multitasking since many people fool themselves into
thinking they are good at multitasking. But actually very few can solidly focus on more than 1
or two tasks, particularly if they require focus and depth. They fool themselves into believing
they are getting more done when in reality they are accomplishing less and the quality of the
work is poor. In proper delegation, efficient people give the tasks to others who will perform
them better. When you know how to break down a task and empower others to contribute
effort, you can choose the tasks most suited for you and crank through them in record time
without distraction. They should also be able to apply structure to the schedule with all the
available scheduling and productivity tools you would think so that they can handle their
schedule.

Solution

Based on the foregoing alternatives provided, the solution to the time management
problem and low productivity rate is for Rachel to engage her staff to work efficiently.

As a manager, it is her responsibility to get all the work done by utilizing her staff properly.
As mentioned earlier, there should be proper delegation to her staff of the tasks based on their
skills. That way, they will be able to work on their strengths and provide better outputs on time.
Since her role as a manager is to check their work and report on their progress, she must be
able to instill the sense of responsibility to each of them.

As defined, delegation is the assignment of authority to another person (normally from a

manager to a subordinate) to carry out specific activities. It is the process of distributing and
entrusting work to another person. Delegation is one of the core concepts of management
leadership. The process involves managers deciding which work they should do themselves
and which work should be delegated to others for completion. From a managerial standpoint,
delegation involves shifting project responsibility to team members, giving them the
opportunity to finalize the work product effectively, with minimal intervention. Delegation
empowers a subordinate to make decisions. It is a shifting of decision-making authority as well
as responsibility for the results from one organizational level to another lower one. However, a
certain level of accountability for the outcome of the work does remain with the person who
delegated the work to begin with.

Recommendation

Effective project managers need more than technical skills and abilities. The role also
requires a number of non-technical skills, and it is these softer skills that often determine
whether a project manager and the project will be a success. Project managers must at least
have these seven non-technical skills: leadership, motivation, communication, organization,
prioritization, problem-solving, and adaptability.

Based on this study, the following actions are being recommended:

• Organizational leaders should offer project management training to expand the knowledge of
project managers to effectively and efficiently manage project activities, specifically scarce
resources.
• Project managers must be able to assess properly the skills of their staff for efficient
delegation of duties that needs specialization.
• Organizational leaders should offer compensation and benefits to attract and retain qualified
individuals that are desperately needed to staff research projects; these qualified individuals
are being drawn to other sectors, such as industry for higher compensation.
• Build an internal, but secure repository of scientific and technical personnel within the
organization, available to project managers, which will be a helpful tool in solving the matching
issue on projects.
• Hiring practices for qualified project personnel need to be less complex so the most suitable
candidates may be identified sooner.
• Encourage project managers to collaborate on projects of various sizes and with diverse
stakeholders, as this provides experiential knowledge that can be applied in multiple ways.
• Develop a mentoring program where a senior project manager offers guidance to lesser
experienced managers, to avoid pitfalls, thereby increasing the success of project completion
and delivery.

References:
1 https://www.cio.com/article/3224865/what-is-a-project-manager-the-lead-role-for-
project-success.html
2
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2712&context=doctoral
3
https://www.inc.com/kevin-daum/8-things-really-efficient-people-do.html
4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegation#:~:text=Delegation%20is%20the
%20assignment%20of,to%20carry%20out%20specific%20activities.&text=The
%20process%20involves%20managers%20deciding,delegated%20to%20others%20for
%20completion.