Some years ago I asked a senior business manager the characteristics they looked for in a project manager. I expected a list of specific characteristics and personal attributes giving a preferred ‘profile’ of the ideal candidate. What I got, however, surprised me. “I need someone a bit like Lee with regard to getting things done and a bit like Maya with regard to keeping everyone on board with the project”. When I pushed a little bit harder for a more specific description the eventual response was – “I just can’t say, all I know is I know it when I see it!”

This exchange, gave a particularly useful insight into the combination of capabilities that makes a ‘project manager’. The practice of project management can be seen as a manifestation of the knowledge, skills, behaviors and experience of the project manager at a given point in time. Project management is a ‘situated’ practice – it is activity that takes place within a social setting, across and within geographic locations at a particular time for a specific purpose.

It is difficult to deconstruct or accurately predict the specific combination of capabilities required in any given circumstance. It is the project manager who configures and references that which is appropriate and pertinent from his/her repertoire of capabilities to accomplish a given task or to achieve a desired outcome. It is this practice that our customers and colleagues witness and which they (and we) can find so very hard to describe.

If we take project management capability as a set of repertoires (with regard to project management as a discipline), we can suggest how a view of project management practice might be usefully described.

As a specific discipline project management references a body of knowledge (enhanced and modified by the greater community of project managers both locally and globally). Project management also calls upon the use of a set of tools, a kit bag of techniques and approaches that are used as appropriate to the needs of the project by the project manager.

The project manager behaves as is appropriate to the role he/she occupies in the course of his/her duties, and as we all have experienced, this ‘role’ is very varied in character, ranging from strategist, to facilitator right across to ‘hands on’ fixer as is required. This complexity of practice is what makes project management both extremely difficult and highly rewarding and challenging.

Project management also makes one other big request of project managers, this is that they are always learning, adapting to changing circumstances, moving with the changing times and indeed being the instigators of change.

This learning can be best supported by communities of project management practitioners. It is in these collegial situations that we can share and shape the way we practice and engage in the world of work as distinct and valued professionals. The learning is contributed to by those fellow travelers who have developed subtleties in their use of the knowledge and skills generally available to the whole project management community for improved effect in specific and particular circumstances.

These gems of practice wisdom are rarely found in books and lectures. They do however, exist in abundance at coffee and lunch meetings with fellow project managers. It is this learning of how we ‘do’ project management that best characterizes project management practice – from the novice to the expert we still practice our discipline in ever changing circumstances. What is comforting is that this learning is a shared journey and as such the basis for a sustaining and supporting professional practice community.

Eamonn O’Laocha (MBA, B.ED, Prince2 Practitioner)

Presently Project Manager at the University of Warwick, England

Formerly Professional Development Manager (Project Management) and Project Manager at Sun Microsystems UK