More than ever PMs depend on their professionalism and extremely wide range of competences. This imposes tough requirements on the PM’s skills and background. Contrariwise, organizations are faced a tough choice hiring right PMs to projects, especially critical.
The root cause of this contradiction comes from inference that PM is a pure management position. As we can see in numerous contrast cases in IT industry, this is not correct. In this field PM’s success often clearly correlates with technical background and deep expertise.
The conclusion is – it’s normal to choose PM from the much wider auditory than so called “professional PMs”. Giving a chance to the person with highly relevant experience or skill set definitely makes sense. It just needs to remember that anyway PM specific knowledge remains important and should be properly learned and adopted.
The second issue lies much more deeper.
Organizations and PMs are often confused project management and change management. It could lead to complete fail trying to treat the situation as a project when it should be treated as a change. We can see wrong goals as well as a great deal of undetected risks. This is one of the reasons why in the last years Change Management (CM) as a discipline made a big leap in its development (see, for example, materials from ACMP - Association of Change Management Professionals).
What the principal difference between PM and CM? In short, in context.
Thinking about a project we need to understand its goals, boundaries and restrictions. To cope with a change in the business we need to observe and understand everything as wide as we can. Change can be continuous and it’s typical to observe a cascade of changes. Managing the project is aiming to be definitely finished at some time point.
And one more thing. It may seem that managing a project is simply one of the examples of more wide change management practice. It seems to be, but with one critical difference. In change management “human side of change” is of huge importance. PMs, to be successful, should adopt mostly a process approach, and even teams and stakeholders are typically considered as elements of certain processes. And I always have a filing that in PM practice we’re often missing something very important. Business made by people, not by processes, and real success becomes possible when a leader can percept and understand the real world.