In today’s world, the duties of the project managers working in the market are to handle a lot of different project management applications like nTask, which will take care of all of their work for them. And they should have these applications. This article will highlight the project manager’s roles and responsibilities.
Why? Well, the roles and responsibilities of project managers are quite much in quantity and severity, as they have to make sure that the whole team is doing their job, the company is actively gaining value and all of the stakeholders are happy, among many others.
So, naturally, they need all the help that they can to make sure that their roles and responsibilities are performed perfectly.
A project manager is a professional individual who plans, organizes, and executes projects while working within the restraints of budgets and schedules. Project managers are in charge of leading teams, communicating with stakeholders, defining goals, and seeing a project through to its closure.
Mainly, in the broader sense, project managers (PMs) are responsible for planning, directing, and organizing the completion of specific projects for an organization while ensuring these projects are on time, on budget, and within scope.
Project manager with the help of their team is charged with multiple responsibilities that span the five project phases of a project life cycle (initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and closing below.
These roles often include laying down the foundations of the company and the whole workflow and hiring the appropriate staff to take care of that workflow.
The managers all have to create the perfect work-life balance to make sure that they have a personal life otherwise their professional life will consume them.
Creating that balance is a dream come true but it’s not an ideal case for every project manager working out there. They have to make a lot of sacrifices to create it.
But isn’t there a tried and tested strategy to create that balance? Well, the mantra is to focus on the most important things that are vital to the company and the stakeholders and dedicate the other roles to the applications and the personnel.
And it’s not like all of these roles, responsibilities, and their attached issues, just sprung on the project managers this year, these basic principles have been the same including performing the activities related to the project, managing the resources and activities, etc.
If you have been a part of the project management paradigm for a while, then you would know that project managers use nTask to perform all of these activities to ensure that they accomplish all of their goals and milestones, bringing more value to the company.
So, without further ado, let’s take a look at all of the key roles and responsibilities of a project manager in 2022.
10 Key Project Manager Roles and Responsibilities
Discussed below are the most vital roles and responsibilities of a project manager to make their company and development team successful whole creating a work-life balance for themselves so that their work does not consume them.
1. Planning the Workflow
The first order of business if you are a leader of any country or company, or if you are a CEO, project manager, or a stakeholder in high-level management, is to plan for all of the activities that are going to happen in your company or domain.
This preparation will help you define the scope of the project and make a proper schedule that you have to convey to the team and make sure that they adhere to it otherwise the whole planning phase is useless.
The main rule of the planning phase is to make sure that the team can follow the planned workflow and is capable of handling any changing requirements along the way, because no project until now has been completed in the way it was planned, and the team has to make sure that they finish the project in the specified budget and time, to be successful.
2. Assemble the Perfect team for the Job
Once the planning has been done, the next role of the project manager is to make sure that the company has the most perfect development team in place if it wants to produce an amazing product and gain more value in the market.
The development team is under observation at all times by the hawk-eyed managers to make sure that they are not slacking off and are performing their duties efficiently.
This progress of the team is tracked by project management software like nTask, which can help you keep an eye on every project, task, or activity that the team is performing so that you are not out of the loop for even a second and everything goes seamlessly according to plan.
Apart from the work stuff, the project manager has a dedicated human resource staff that handles all the other day-to-day activities related to the employees. They negotiate the job role, salary, time allocation, and other elements related to a professional contract.
3. Delegating Responsibilities to Teams
Every day in the organizational paradigm, companies take on bigger and bigger challenges to bring more value to the business but not all big projects can be done by only the project manager at the front lines, they have to delegate responsibilities.
This task delegation perk is a good opportunity for the managers to make a deeper connection with their team so that they could learn about each other and the manager can get to know the strengths and weaknesses of the team members.
But they should not misuse this perk and delegate all of their roles and responsibilities to the team members and blame them for any faulty planning or storyboarding that you did which lead to failure.
The task delegation should also be done with the utmost care. The project manager needs to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the team members so that they can evaluate the severity of the tasks and dedicate the duties to the right employee.
Nail Project Manager Interview With This Guide:
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4. Time Management
One of the important roles and responsibilities of a project manager is to make sure that the team adheres to the time factor related to the project.
This is because time is the most important resource a project manager has in their arsenal and they need to make sure that it is not spent unwisely.
They need to make sure in the planning phase, to discuss all of the time elements related to the project, with the stakeholders attached to the whole shebang. They need to discuss the exact milestone duration and note down all of the details of the meeting.
Once they have had that conversation with the stakeholders, they need to discuss everything with their team. This will ensure that the team members are in the loop and they know what they have to do and the time they have to do it.
A good project workflow needs to have the following elements:
- Process
- Schedule development
- Objectives
- Estimating duration
- Schedule control
5. Managing All of the Deliverables
Another important role and responsibility of a project manager are to make sure that the agreed-upon deliverables are delivered on time according to the timeline given by the upper management and the stakeholders.
The managers can use project management software to keep track of the performance of the team members to make sure that everything is on track and no one is slacking off.
The following are the most important questions that the project managers are responsible for asking their team members about deliverables. They are:
- What is the team doing?
- Is there a business opportunity or risk?
- What are the popular project management techniques?
- Where are the records and project documents?
- When are the things being done?
- What are the changes being made in the organization?
- Why are we doing it?
- How are we going to do it?
- Who is doing what?
- What are the specifications, schedules, meetings, etc?
6. Monitor the Progress
Truth be told, the major chunk of the managers’ day-to-day routine is to keep an eye on all of the employees to find out how they are doing their work, how they are handling their tasks, and how they are slacking off or making progress.
This is a necessary aspect of the project manager’s job because if he is not vigilant and lets the employees spend their time irresponsibly; it can cause the company some fatal damage that would be irreparable and you would lose more than value and money.
You would lose the respect of the market.
Why? Well, when have you ever heard of a manager who didn’t manage their team properly and he got to be in the game for the long run? It’s a cut-throat market out there and you need to be on you’re A-game as a manager, to make sure that your team and company are successful.
Try using the project management software nTask, which will help you track all of the elements related to your project and let you track every single thing related to your project.
7. Regular Meetings with the Team
When you are a project manager, you always need to be in constant communication with the employees or the team members in one way or another. This can be a friendly chat in the hall, a proper one-to-one meeting in your office, or just a casual meet and greet at their cubicles.
What will that do? Well, these interactions are very important as they a sense of recognition and a bond of trust between you and the employees. Also, you get to know the employees, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what you can do to help them in tight spaces.
When you have done that, you are ready to take these interactions to the next level and schedule regular interactions with the team altogether.
These meetings are of different kinds of interactions between the manager and the team members like sprint planning sessions, regular meetings or daily stand-ups, etc.
These meetings help make sure that everyone is doing their work and no one has any issues regarding their work, if they have any issues, they can discuss them with the team to hopefully find a solution.
8. Visualize the Future and Show it to the Team
As a project manager, you need to make sure that you have a plan for the future of the team, the project, and the company in place. And if you don’t have one, then you need to visualize it as soon as possible.
Why? Well, if the leader doesn’t shine a light on the road ahead, then how will the people follow them by going to see anything?
Having a vision for the future is very important as it sets the precedent for all of the future projects that the company will develop to bring more value to it.
Once the vision has been properly constructed, you need to convey that information to the team members.
Why? Well, they are the ones that are going to work on the things that you are envisioning and they have a right to know what is coming towards them so that they can prepare themselves for the fight ahead and emerge victoriously.
Visualize the progress with these Gantt Chart software:
The 25 Best Gantt Chart Software for Project Management in 2022
9. Managing the Documentation
Last but not least, the documentation related to the project. The project manager has to make sure that all of the paperwork related to the project and all the other sections of the company are well-curated and stored safely.
Managing a project properly can include assigning team members tasks and creating deadlines. To assist you and your team to be much more efficient, consider using and managing project management documents to use, and how to use them can help produce a streamlined process that will be beneficial for your team’s success.
There are multiple project management documents that project manager must organize when starting out a new project, such as project business case, project charter, project communications plans, project schedule, project budget, work breakdown structure, risks log, change request management, actions, and issues log and so on.
This documentation makes sure that all of the projects that are going to be developed after the one in question are going to be an improvement on their predecessor just because the documentation was present to make sure that no mistake was repeated and no scope creep was allowed to fester.
10. Finding the Best Software
One of the most important responsibilities of a project manager is to make sure that the team has an awesome feature-packed project management software that will help them to achieve all the goals and milestones.
In our opinion, you would be happy with nTask. It is an extraordinary software that allows you to solve all your project management issues through different features that are just waiting to be yours at $3/month.
Want to know what features the software offer? Let’s take a look at all of the different functionality this amazing application has in store for you:
- Project Management: First and foremost, the application has to have a killer command over its core feature ‘Project Management’, otherwise what good would it do to you in any other department?
- Time Tracking: The application contains an amazing time tracking feature that allows the managers and team members to take a look at the time it took for their colleagues and themselves to perform a task or activity. Managers can use this data to measure the performance of the team members and whether or not they want to keep that person in the company.
- Risk Management: The Risk management feature allows the managers to spot scope creeps and other potential risks that can harm the software, from a mile away. This helps to keep the software safe and secure from the moment the brainstorming starts to the point where it is handed off to the client.
- Task Management: This feature allows the managers to track the progress of the tasks that the team members are performing and whether or not they are performing at the most optimal level.
- Meeting Management: This feature allows the managers to conduct all sorts of scrum interactions and meetings amongst the team members to ensure that there are no blind spots and everyone is on the same page regarding the software.
- Issue Tracking: This feature allows the software to track each issue that can potentially become a nuisance in the future and helps the manager to eradicate it as soon as possible.
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Depending on the size and nature of your company, the project manager’s roles and responsibilities may vary accordingly. Take the aforementioned tips as a guideline and feel free to improvise accordingly.
The roles and responsibilities of a software project manager should be appropriately trained in project management techniques and processes as well. For substantial project management tasks, it is essential that the skills and experience of the project manager are matched to the requirements of the project and the business should find appropriate training.
The project manager must apply the quality management principles and processes, tailor expert knowledge to meet specific circumstances, and direct, manage and motivate the project team while planning and managing the deployment of physical and financial resources to meet project milestones.
