Project Manager job description

Project management — Project Manager
Runs a project end to end against agreed scope, time and budget.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Project Planning
- Project Scope Definition — You can agree scope for a project whose stakeholders want different things, and write the exclusions and assumptions so nobody can later read them two ways.
- Work Breakdown Structure Development — You can build the breakdown for a large project so that nothing in scope is missing and nothing outside it has crept in, and use it as the basis for the schedule.
- Schedule Building and Critical Path Analysis — You can schedule a complex project with external dependencies and constrained resources, and show a sponsor exactly which delay moves the end date and by how much.
- Resource Planning and Allocation — You can resolve over-allocation on your project by moving work, changing sequence or negotiating with line managers, before it causes a slip.
- Project Budgeting and Cost Control — You can track actual spend against a small project's budget and report the variance each month with the reason for it.

Delivery Control
- Project Status Reporting — You can report a project going red early and plainly, with the cause and the recovery options, rather than waiting until the slip cannot be hidden.
- Milestone and Progress Tracking — You can measure progress by what is actually finished rather than effort spent, and catch work that has been reported as nearly done for weeks.
- Change Control and Scope Management — You can assess a change request's effect on time, cost and scope for your project, and take it to the right person for a decision.
- Delivery Methodology Selection — You can run a project under either a predictive or an iterative approach when the method has been chosen for you.
- Project Meeting and Workshop Facilitation — You can run a kick-off or planning workshop with people from several teams, and leave with an agreed plan even when they arrived disagreeing.
- Project Closure and Lessons Learned — You can close your project formally, with handover to operations, acceptance confirmed and people released on time.

Risk & Governance
- Project Risk and Issue Management — You can keep a live risk and issue log for your project, with a response and a review date for every item.
- Cross-Project Dependency Mapping — You can map the dependencies between your project and others, and agree a date and an owner with the other side for each.
- Project Governance and Stage Gates — You can take your project through the organisation's stage gates, presenting the evidence each gate asks for.
- Supplier and Contractor Delivery Management — You can manage a supplier's day-to-day delivery on your project, checking progress and quality against the agreed deliverables.
- Deliverable Acceptance and Sign-Off — You can handle a disputed acceptance by separating a real defect from a new requirement, and get the decision recorded.

Stakeholders & Teams
- Sponsor and Steering Committee Engagement — You can brief your sponsor regularly and bring them the decisions only they can make, each with a recommendation.
- Project Team Mobilisation — You can agree roles, responsibilities and ways of working with a small project team at the start, and write them down.
- Business Change and Adoption Planning — You can help deliver training and communications to users at go-live, following a plan someone else wrote.

Portfolio & PMO
- Benefits Realisation Management — You can state the benefits your project is meant to deliver, as written in its business case.
- Portfolio Prioritisation and Capacity Balancing — You can keep the list of active and proposed projects current, with each one's status and sponsor.
- PMO Standards and Tooling — You can set up a new project in the standard tools and templates, and help colleagues use them.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can organise a small piece of work into steps, put them in a sensible order, and finish it by the date you agreed, raising problems before they cause a delay.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate your own work with reasonable accuracy and keep a steady enough pace that other people can plan around you.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can pick up a problem that has no obvious owner and make yourself accountable for it, including the parts nobody enjoys.
- Quality Focus — You can define what good enough means for a project, put checks in place to show it has been met, and hold work back when it falls short.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can break a large, ambiguous problem into manageable pieces, weigh the options against evidence, and explain the tradeoff you chose.
- Domain Expertise — You can work confidently with the tools and methods your team uses daily, and you can explain how your work serves the team's goals.
- Continuous Learning — You can pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it, and you turn what you learned into something others can reuse.

Communication
- Communication — You can explain a complex topic to people with very different backgrounds, adjusting the detail to the audience without talking down to them.
- Collaboration — You can build working relationships beyond your own team and get things done through people who do not report to you.
- Writing & Documentation — You can write for a defined audience, whether a proposal, a policy, a report, or a decision record, and make the reasoning as clear as the conclusion.
- Stakeholder Management — You can identify who is affected by your work and keep them updated at a level of detail and a frequency that suits them.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can spot a problem and propose a way forward unprompted, and you take a small leading role such as running a working group.
- Mentoring — You can help someone new settle into your team's work, answer their questions patiently, and give feedback specific enough to act on.
- Strategic Thinking — You can connect your team's work to its goals and question a task that does not appear to serve them.