How roles change as the project matures
At the beginning of the project, through the planning and initiation phases, the
project manager is more like a dictator. All documents and control are developed
and maintained by him or her. The management strategy tends to be centralized
and controlled. This is necessary in the beginning of the project to ensure a
completed plan is developed and all stakeholders agree to the plan.
At the executing stage, however, the management strategy needs to evolve
in order for the project to continue on a rapid timeline. Also, at this stage, the
project has grown to such a size that one person can’t manage everything and
stay on schedule.
On the one hand, the project manager may wish to make all the decisions.
There is no communication overhead because there is only one person respon-
sible to upper management. There is only one person with the vision and the
need to know everything about the project. Unfortunately, this strategy doesn’t
work, because no one person knows enough to do a good job of making all the
decisions. Management strategies that are balanced toward centralized control
are also difficult to execute, because they require lots of overhead on the part of
those being managed.
On the other hand, the opposite strategy doesn’t work either. You can’t
just let everyone go off and do what they want without any oversight. People
inevitably go' off on tangents. Someone needs to have a bigger view of the
project, and to be able to influence the project when it gets off course. So, once
again, we can fall back on principles to help us navigate between these two
extremes. `