The Value of a Good Dedicated Project Manager

A good project manager can be hard to find, and if you do find one, expensive to hire. For these reasons, many organizations attempt to complete complex projects without employing a dedicated project manager, opting instead to have an existing employee take on the added responsibilities of managing the project. This very seldomly ends well.

Publication Date:  10 January 2024

Good project managers are hard to find and expensive. This leads many organizations to try to complete complex projects without a dedicated project manager. Instead, these organizations often assign project management responsibilities for a project to an existing employee who already has numerous other responsibilities on their plate. In some rare instances, when the right employee is selected and enough existing work is taken off their plate to allow them the time they need to successfully manage the project, this can work. However, it is most often disastrous.

One of the main reasons organizations decide not to have dedicated project managers lead projects is that they have been burned by employing project managers in the past. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that there are a lot of people out there calling themselves project managers, many of whom have fancy certifications hanging on their walls, that have absolutely no business leading anything. Many organizations have employed project managers like this in the past and are now rightfully very leery of the entire profession.

One of the other main reasons organizations decide not to employ dedicated project managers is that good ones are expensive. Just like is the case in other professional areas, good project managers have spent many years acquiring experience and education in their chosen field, and as a result have developed an exceptional level of skill and proficiency. This level of talent and expertise is not cheap, and the cost of a top-level project manager is often surprising and off-putting to organizations.

Given how hard it is to find a good project manager and how expensive it can be when you do find one, it is not at all surprising that many organizations attempt to complete complex projects without having a dedicated project manager in place. Nonetheless, it is typically a very bad idea to do so.

Most organizations that decide to attempt to complete a complex project without a dedicated project manager assign project management responsibilities for the project to an existing employee instead. This employee typically already has a full workload of other responsibilities and lacks proficiency in project management. Thus in order for this person to be successful at their new project management responsibilities, significant parts of their existing workload need to be offloaded from them and moved to someone else. Most organizations do not have the employee depth and bandwidth to make this kind of significant workload transfer. So typically it is just not done and the person assigned project management responsibilities for the organization’s important new project is left to figure out on their own how to successfully manage the project and complete all of their regular job responsibilities. Unsurprisingly, this typically ends horribly.

Projects that do not have a dedicated project manager often catastrophically fail as a result of slow and sustained project slippage. This comes about because the person who is assigned project management responsibilities for the project does not have the time or skill set to successfully do what needs to be done to keep the project on timeline and budget. So slowly over the course of the project’s entire timeline things drift more and more off track, until close to the project’s scheduled completion date the organization realizes the project is in very bad shape. Sometimes organizations will reach out to a highly skilled project manager at this point and ask them to help get things back on track. But it is all too frequently much too late and even the best project manager cannot save the project.

The value of a good dedicated project manager lies in having highly experienced, educated, and talented eyes focused on a project every single day. A good project manager is continually monitoring all aspects of a project and relying on the skills they have developed over years of practice to detect and respond to small issues before they become large issues that can threaten the overall success of a project. This is simply something that can very rarely be done by someone who is inexperienced in project management and distracted by other, more familiar, job responsibilities.

Good project managers are hard to find and expensive. It is up to you to decide if your project is worth it.