Project management skills are so valuable that they can be used in everyday work-life and not just in a specific project.
This is the view of Professor Pieter Steyn, principal of Cranefield College, and the first South African to be appointed to the research management board of the International Project Management Association.
In recent years, the number of vacancies for project managers in various job fields in South Africa appears to have grown. In response, training companies and universities are offering a range of qualifications, from short courses to components of MBA programmes and undergraduate commerce degrees.
According to Steyn, ‘companies are all desperately trying to move away from bureaucratic practices and the old economy [style of management] to ‘learning organisations.’” The previous bureaucratic function in line management caused red tape, communication gaps and had transactional leaders.
According to Andrew McGregor, MD of Cohesion Project Management Solutions, project managers are facilitators: ‘Projects take the company from where it is today to where it wants to be in the future — in a controlled way. Project managers get the work done through other people who typically do not report to them. Once the objectives of the project have been met, team members revert to their original jobs. A project manager must therefore be able to have influence without authority, build relationships and be a people’s person.”
In consultation with members of the team, he or she works out the timeframe of the project, costs and implementation dates, oversees the implementation of the project and provides updates to the key stakeholders. ‘A project manager earns his stripes and succeeds in the job by developing trust, cultivating leadership, being a true team player, managing expertise, building relationships and managing diversity,” says McGregor.
However, a project manager also ‘has a high level of intuition and talent to coordinate and integrate processes in other operational work such as customer relationship management, and procurement,” says Steyn.