Attending a short course in project management does not make you a project manager. It is advisable to start off by getting involved in a project team, then to work your way up, says Henry Lotz, project management coordinator at North West University.
A former medical doctor, Nwabisa Ntlokwana, now a project manager for Emba PM, a project management company, emphasises that “formal training is very important. You can learn in the field but you don’t appreciate the rationale for doing things until you go for formal training.”
Ntlokwana manages projects that centre on infrastructure planning and include the upgrading of the Sharpeville Exhibition Centre, development of the Sharpeville cemetery and the development of the June 16 Memorial Park in Soweto.
She emphasises that the job “is never boring because you get to work with different field experts”. She says the trick to doing a project is “to have people on your team who know what they are doing and to be careful during the planning stages. Sometimes there are projects that run late — some risky things can occur unanticipated. If you run late on one side you could try to accelerate on another side and bring in experts for advice.”
According to Ntlokwana, project managers need to be team builders and they must love working with people. “You should not get sidetracked by issues of character or emotions and [should] have a critical way of looking at things.”
But a project is not a project if there are no resources (money and human). And problems occur when the client is not clear on the outcomes or processes: “They give you money and they want the building tomorrow.”
Taryn van Olden, chief executive of Project Management South Africa — an organisation that works towards developing the profession — says project management has been perceived as an accidental profession for some time, in which people with other technical competencies in, for example, engineering, gradually take on managing projects using the sometimes limited resources at their disposal.
“Nowadays, people calling themselves project managers are expected to have a combination of knowledge, skills and experience relevant to the project they are managing and the technical discipline related to the project; for example, systems integration, civil engineering, mining. They would also be expected to manage their project using a best-practice standard or methodology.”
She says there seems to be a global shortage of suitably qualified, experienced and skilled project managers. It is an easily transportable skill and those with the right “package” of skills and credentials can find work almost anywhere in the world.
“Recently, many South African project managers headed for foreign shores to earn a good wage, moving on to the next big opportunity and gaining further critical experience.”
But there seem to be more opportunities in South Africa now for project managers to reach senior levels more quickly than they would outside the country, Van Olden says.