Project management versus Project administration. What matters?

Project managers are the quarterbacks of system deployments. It is not an easy job. They need to coordinate many players and drive the team across the finish line. A good manager can make a project team engaged, productive, and ultimately successful. A bad one can turn the whole initiative into a miserable experience with significant delays and cost overruns.

Unfortunately, many project managers get lost in the administrative work early on. When that happens, you need to be alert, as your ship is about to sail into rough waters without the captain on deck. Thus, it is important to understand the difference between project management and project administration.

Let's first clarify what managing a project really means. I think you can boil it down to three key activities: 1) proactively steer the project in the right direction, 2) get the best engagement and work from each team member, and 3) remove the roadblocks that stand in the way of success. Note that none of these is an administrative task. They require a higher level of understanding of what is being deployed, who is deploying it, and where the project stands at any given time. This requires a solid knowledge of the solution and the mission. The project manager must make dozens of decisions during the day: sorting out what is significant versus not, what needs to be prioritized versus what can wait, which project team members are maxed out versus who has availability, and many more. This is relentless, non-stop assessment, prioritization, and delegation work. The best project managers work 2 to 3 weeks ahead of their project teams and make their decisions proactively. In my experience, these project managers tend to be former consultants that have had several hands-on experiences with the products they are deploying.

Project administration is the necessary evil of every project. You must know what is being worked on, what is completed, what is delayed, what are the issues, etc. When project deployments are set up incorrectly or lack good tools, the administrative work shifts from the project team members to the project manager.

For example, if you don't have easy-to-use, cloud-based, mobile-enabled project management tools, it is very hard for the team members to update their tasks and be informed about the status of the rest of the project. Relying on the project manager to do all the reporting for every phase of the project on spreadsheets that are kept in a folder that no one looks at is a poor use of their time. This task can become overwhelming, especially in larger projects. No wonder why the biggest projects incur the biggest delays and cost overruns. 

Project management cannot be sacrificed for the sake of project administration. A better course of action is to have the right tools and shared responsibility so the administrative workload can be distributed among the team members. Then, project managers can really do what they are supposed to do - be the quarterback rather than a scorekeeper.

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My name is Cem and this has been another gem.