Projects live and die by the quality of their project managers. That might sound extreme, but on the whole, it’s true. No other role on a project team has the ability to influence success or failure to the level that the project manager does. While you want high-quality people across your professional services organization, make sure that each and every project manager is outstanding. Project managers are ultimately the governors of profit and client satisfaction, and those two things control the success trajectory of your firm.

So, why is the project manager role more important than other roles on the team? After all, a project team could consist of 10 or 20 people. Most of those people contribute directly to the work product whereas the project manager may have a more indirect role. How could a person who oversees tasks be more vital than the people actually delivering those tasks? We’ll dive into some of the reasons below.

Expectation Management

Professional services are largely about setting expectations, managing expectations, and delivering to those expectations. As stated earlier in Compass, client satisfaction is the difference between the realized experience and the expected experience. Half of the challenge is setting and managing expectations; the other half is delivering on those expectations. The project manager is the one person on the project team who can regularly set and manage expectations with all project stakeholders.

One of the primary means of managing expectations is with a weekly status report and subsequent phone call. The project manager should consistently provide this status report to the project sponsor, if not to all project stakeholders. Additionally, the project manager should host a brief phone call to walk the sponsor through the report each week. The report and call should highlight progress, concerns, questions, and areas of risk. By doing this, the project manager ensures that there are no “big surprises” that get dropped on the client downstream. Big surprises generally correlate to a negative experience from the client’s perspective.

Chief Communicator

The project manager is generally the voice of the team. While individual team members may have a direct communication channel with specific client personnel, the project manager is usually the official spokesperson of the team. Thus, the project manager sets the tone and cadence of the communication with the client. The personality of the entire project team is conveyed in how the project manager communicates. It is imperative that the project manager have excellent communication skills and that the communication is clear, concise, and accurate.

You want project managers who are engaged, personable, and optimistic. The attitude of the project manager is infectious and will heavily influence the morale and outlook of both the project team and the client team. While the project manager should certainly be grounded in reality, he or she should be energized and positive about the work at hand. That attitude should be palpable to everyone who is involved with the project.

The Big Picture

The project manager is the one person on the team who is responsible for monitoring the overall health of the project. While others on the team are focused on delivering their specific set of tasks, the project manager evaluates how all of the tasks across the project are coming along. On a software project, for example, the designers might not realize that the engineers are woefully behind on their development work. The engineers may not realize the designers are waiting on them. But the project manager operates at a higher level and can survey the entire set of tasks and team members.

Problem Identification and Remediation

A generally accepted principle of project delivery is that the longer a problem festers, the more expensive it will be to fix. While this is a common mantra with software engineering projects, it generally applies to all types of professional services engagements. It is vital to identify problems early and then expeditiously develop and execute a remediation plan. Project managers must be acutely aware of project challenges as soon as they present themselves. When problems linger, they almost always have a negative impact on client satisfaction and project profitability.

Since the project manager has visibility into all tasks and personnel on the project, the manager is the best person to identify problems early and develop a plan of attack. If a particular team member is falling behind or delivering defective work, the project manager must identify that problem quickly and mitigate the risk. This often requires the project manager to solicit assistance from other senior members of the firm who have expertise in the problem area. In extreme cases, the project manager may need to replace an underperforming member of the project team in order to protect the outcome and quality of the deliverables.

The Train Conductor

Good project managers keep the trains running on time. They do this by accurately planning out project tasks (often with the assistance of others) and ensuring that appropriate team members deliver those tasks at the needed time. With potentially dozens of interdependent tasks in motion at any given time, the project manager must be highly-organized and disciplined to manage the entire body of work successfully.

When a professional services firm has capable project managers, it is substantially easier to allocate work to team members in a manner that will yield maximum billable utilization (and maximum revenue for the firm). In many firms, there is a separate resourcing function that is responsible for coordinating work for the entire service delivery organization. The goal of that resourcing team is to align appropriate personnel to projects and maximize the overall billable utilization of the firm. That job is made markedly easier with a strong pool of project managers.

Yes, it’s a Billable Role!

Given the reasons stated above, the project manager is the most critical role on just about every project of moderate or large size. Subsequently, all of the tasks completed by the project manager should be billable. Do not allow a client to suggest that project managers just do “busy work”. If the client sponsor was delivering the project internally, he or she would certainly assign a capable project manager to run it. When a client doesn’t want to pay for project management effort, it is a red flag and usually an indication of other engagement problems down the road. If you can’t educate the client on the importance of the role and its billability, just pass on the work.