What the heck does a Project Manager do?

This was a question I was asked a lot in college when I was finishing undergrad and people would ask about my professional future. My awnser was always the same and fairly self explanatory, a project manager is someone who manages projects. They solve issues, manage timelines, plan projects, and remove blockers. They take a lot of stress away from fellow team mates and managers by ensuring everything runs smoothly from start to finish.

A project manager is an essential part of any business. Without them, projects would be chaotic, lack organization and would always run late or worse never being finished. With no rules, expectations, timelines, delegation, or requirements everything is in absolute chaos. A title I like to tell people I have “chaos organizer” but really it’s just a project manager. I tend to put pieces of projects together by looking at them and see where they connect. When I was younger I would play with puzzles. But it wasn’t until I was much older that I found most people build the other corners of a puzzle and work on filling it. However, I would put puzzle pieces together from any connection I could see. Circumstances are rarely perfect for, well anything and sometimes it’s best to work with what is given to you. Which is what I do constantly with many projects that I have come into after they have been in development without a project manager for sometime.

Without a project manager you may have multiple people who are responsible for different parts of the project. This can cause confusion as to who is doing what and when things need to be done by. It also leaves room for error if one person does not understand what another person is doing on their end of things.

A project manager also helps prevent miscommunication between team members by having clear expectations set out at the beginning of each task so everyone knows exactly what needs to be accomplished by when and how it fits into the overall project timeline. They can also act as a scribe for projects by documenting any requirements that may be changed from clients/internal sources.

If your company is not using a PMO (project management office) then it may seem like there are no resources available to help with your projects but that isn't true! There are many online tools available such as Trello or Asana which offer free versions that allow teams to stay organized without breaking the bank. I professionally recommend using Jira, but honestly anything is better than nothing (except in the case of a one page running google document and yes i’ve heard this offered as a suggestion).