Note: This is a special guest post from our Friends at Easy Projects.
Few positions have ever been as difficult to fill as that of a project manager. Not because experienced PMs are hard to find, but because management often does not have a solid idea of what project management is all about. If a project manager gets hired for the wrong reasons or expectations, then he/she will only be able to deliver limited amounts of success. So then, you might be wondering how to hire the right project manager…
If you want your new project manager to deliver real value and results, then your hiring process should begin well before you even look at a resume.
Determine Your Situation
It’s not enough to simply say “we need someone to finish the project.” You need to thoroughly analyze the situation and see what challenges the incoming project manager is going to face.
Is your project behind schedule? Are you encountering a morale problem? Is your organization working under severe budget constraints?
Answering these questions and more will help you narrow down the kind of experience you want your project manager to have. Also, it will help you figure out what else you can do to keep things moving (shuffle resources, for example) while you search for the right PM.
Determine Who You Need
Project managers come with many different backgrounds. Every single one of them can bring value to a team, but not necessarily your team.
Assuming you’ve done the above step and know your needs, who among the candidates would be best suited to fulfill it? Do you need an organizer? Someone to take the reins of a chaotic project and bring in some structure? Do you need a motivator, a PM who will bring a broken team together and get them working as one unit again?
Ideally, project managers will have all these skills available to them. But budget constraints, timing, and availability issues may force you to hire a PM who leans more towards a core specialty rather than being a jack-of-all trades.
Determine What You’ll Let Him Do
Before you put pen to paper and sign that employment agreement, you need to discuss with the PM what you expect him to do and how management expects him to do it. Ordering a project manager to restructure a team, but not giving him the authority to implement hiring/firing decisions is worse than useless. Likewise, don’t be offended if a project manager you hired for his productivity goes and ignores your established process in favor of one that actually works.
Hopefully this post has shed some light on how to hire the right project manager. When you’re looking to hire, keep your expectations realistic and transparent, and maintain a dialog with your project manager both before and well after the hiring process. The benefit is twofold: your project manager will be able to voice concerns and suggestions to improve things, and you will be able to evaluate and control any changes to your organization’s workflow.
Easy Projects is a popular web-based project management software used in over fifty countries. To learn more about project management, and why your team probably needs a project manager, see: http://www.easyprojects.net/blog/2012/10/23/why-your-team-needs-a-project-manager/
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