A day in the life of a Project Manager

A day in the life of a Project Manager

For someone that is already working as a project manager, they can connect with the title of the article. Yes, project managers typical daily duties are meetings, follow-ups, statuses, financials, schedule. But they vary from company to company and program to program, which also means that there are definitely deviations in duties from typical project management.

Meetings- Obvious in almost every day in the life of a PM. But why so many meetings and only for PM’s? It is because he/she is the one that is interacting with many stakeholders from cross-functional departments and different business/application areas. The coordination and communication play a key role in executing a project successfully and meetings are an efficient way to connect, communicate and work toward the project tasks, risks or issues.

Follow-ups- Follow-ups are also a daily routine, and all the more important and necessary especially if the project team/leads are not taking accountability. PM is the messenger and should act like one to bridge gaps and stay on the top of the timelines. So follow-ups are necessary and are part of a daily routine.

Financials – This may not necessarily be the daily routine if you are working on one project, but almost the daily routine even if it is one project you are managing. You will have a lot of work to look at the numbers, dashboards, trends, puts/takes, variances. Adding new resources to the project, allocating them and incorporating these numbers into various status reports etc. This activity is daily for a PM and needs to monitor continuously in order to avoid variance on the project.

Documentation- PM will make updates to documents. First under the list is project plan. The project plan is updated on a regular basis. Weekly updates come from the status meetings, however, the plan is constantly looked at and updated based on the work breakdown structure and resource changes. There is other documentation that the PM needs does, project charter being the first one, developing RACI, updating phase gate documents, obtaining approvals etc. Maintaining project documents in the SharePoint site for both audit and historical data perspective is something that a PM regularly does!!

Those described above are some of the main categories in which PM has his/her own daily duties on. There could be other things that a PM generally/occasionally does based on the program type, size, complexity and also the domain in which the company is(healthcare/retail etc). Hope this article helped you understand a broader perspective in the daily life of a PM.

 

Happy PM’ing : -)

 

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