Definitive Guide: What Makes a Senior IT Project Manager

I’ve been a project manager since the year 2000, and technically longer than that — though that is when I took on the title and performed nothing but project management. What I want to explore today is what are the things that make one a “senior project manager”.

Whether you are a hiring manager looking for your next project manager, or you are a project manager looking for the “next level”, this article aims to identify what is a senior project manager.

Some may view a senior project manager as one that has been a project manager for a certain time, having completed a certain number of projects, or perhaps it is just a title created to fit into the HR pay grade system.

In my view, there are a few key things that differentiate between a project and a senior project manager.

Project Management Defined

I like to define project management as the art and science of strongly influencing work to achieve well-defined objectives, so as to optimize quality, optimize work efficiency, avoid risks, and do all of that within the project budget.

Ok, I made that definition up, but that is how I define project management. Yes, you see the obligatory triple constraints of cost/quality/time in my definition which is the thing every project manager fires off at interviews. I also mention risk in my definition… why?

I mention risk because anyone that manages a project without specifically embedding risk management into the project’s foundation isn’t a project manager — they are just lucky.

What do I mean by “strongly influencing projects”? Well, I just don’t like the idea of defining something by using the same words as that which you are trying to define. Yes, “project management” is “managing projects”. But what is management, really?

In my view, management is the specific act of strategizing to achieve certain objectives and using one’s influence across the areas needed to ensure those objectives are met. Anyone that has ever managed a project or two knows it is all about influence, and one’s ability to influence without being granted absolute authority.

We all know that project management involves influencing those that ultimately pay the bill on the project, dozens of stakeholders across the owning organization, and the entire team of experts who will do the work.

Stakeholder Management

For the longest time, there were nine areas of knowledge in the PMI’s project management methodology. These days, it’s a nice round number of ten. I don’t say that to imply they added it just to make it an even 10, because stakeholder management has always been an important part of project management.

What is stakeholder management? No, I am not copying from the PMBoK right now. In my view, you have to understand who the stakeholders are, what their stake in the project exactly is, how the project affects their areas of responsibility or the quality of their life, and develop a strategy for making the project a positive thing for each stakeholder. Of course, that means communicating, status reporting, etc. along the way.

This is another area where project management gets a little hard — because stakeholders’ needs tend to be at odds with others. This brings us to politics.

Political Management

No, politics has not been added as an 11th area of knowledge. But a project manager who is really managing any project of a large scale across a large organization certainly needs to understand the political dynamics at play, and specifically how the project will affect those dynamics.

And just as a political advisor must do, a project manager must also understand the political landscape and get “in front of” any potential bombshells. For example, if a project is being done to eliminate human effort, there is a good chance the result will be laying off people — and those people were involved in the project.

Ah, so that explains why one certain group combative of the project from day one! Yeah, as a project manager, you do not have the ability to change that destiny, but you do have to figure out how to help those affected end up on a positive note. Because usually a company that strategizes to eliminate positions will try to cross-train the affected people into other roles, and if that is not possible then at a minimum the affected people will get outstanding job references.

We all know politics have been at work long before we were even born, but in my view, the political landscape which project managers must navigate is a lot worse than it used to be. One reason, I would say, is that people have become accustomed to stopping at nothing — including misinformation, deception, and flat-out lying — to drive their agenda.

Example: Neutralizing a Political Landmine

I recall one project which would have a significant impact on the call volume to the organization’s internal IT help desk because there was anticipation that the project would change something that potentially affected 100,000 people, and which might cause concern or they needed help understanding how to modify their workflow accordingly.

As many past projects had learned the hard way, the individual in charge of the help desk would make senior management keenly aware if any call volume uptick could be attributed to any given project — and they would be looking for a place to charge back those costs.

What I did, was what I always do at the onset of my project, which was to determine what the end game looked like, and specifically how the project would transition to day-to-day support. Along the way, the project produced help desk use cases and first-level support scripts, escalations criteria, etc.

In addition, I negotiated a set of measurable targets which would define “success” regarding help desk support. It turned out that our project needed to have a first-call resolution rate of 75% to make the help desk happy.

Of course, I had to figure out how to tap into their ticketing system to find the call volume and resolutions. This will segue well into what I will next talk about: analysis and data mining.

But before we go on to that, let me finish by saying that we ended up with a first-call resolution rate of over 90%, and that made it impossible to paint the project in a negative light from the perspective of the executive that owned the global help desk organization.

Instead of reaching the end game and having the project take black eyes, the project became a model for how all other projects should run in terms of transition to the help desk.

So What Is a Senior Project Manager?

At this point, I’d like to take a stab at defining what a “senior” project manager is. In my view, it is a project manager that is regarded as having mastered all aspects of project management. It isn’t necessarily a time-bound title, though it would be hard to be a “master” without many years of experience.

A senior project manager, in my view, is:

• One who sets the trends which other projects should strive to follow. Establishes repeatable processes and an execution model from which future projects will benefit. Trains and mentors project managers and pass on these lessons and processes learned. Develops the knowledge base of the project organization.
• One who appears to have a crystal ball. Foresees risks and proactively manages risks such that all stakeholders are placing high confidence in the future execution, as well as the project team.
• One who is able to perform analysis of the most complex project and business environments which impact a project. Able to solve any data-driven problem of any scale. Transforms sketchy data into actionable data.

Let us think through the mastery that senior project managers must have in 2021, specifically to understand the multiple dimensions of projects.

Mastering the Multiple Dimensions of Projects

Most IT projects in 2021 have a simple “asset-based” view which is easy to see and define, and there are a number of dimensions which are lurking. For example, in the infrastructure space, there are data centre migrations, migrations into public/private clouds, etc. which fundamentally transform all layers beneath the application layer — and which aim to not negatively impact the application layer.

On the surface, our example project is simply moving 2,000 servers. Let’s break it into waves and begin, right? Well, no.

If we are talking about servers, any given server could be a common database server, or it could be serving up application-specific microservices. For end users, and other applications, to consume those microservices, there is a set of core services upon which these servers depend, such as DNS name resolution, Kerberos, LDAP, Active Directory, etc.

How one migrates those assets without breaking the inter-application dependencies and core services dependencies is the real question.

But, there is still more to the real question… there will be a security dimension. What security services are deployed that control access to the services being migrated and/or monitor the security of those services? For example, there may be a system based on “whitelists”, which might use the IP address and/or mac address, and if that is not preserved through the migration it will break applications.

Or, security bits may not cause application breakage but will cause the security posture to be degraded. For example, the applications might continue to work but the security environment is no longer actively monitoring those servers/services. While this isn’t as bad as fallout from broken applications, degraded security shouldn’t be anyone’s goal in 2021 — even temporarily.

If these additional dimensions of the project are not understood, part of the planning, not built into the project with specific handling, and not on the risk radar, it is a failure waiting to happen.

Early in my project management career, I learned that any given project to deploy an IT solution is only so big, but embedding that IT solution into a working business is much, much bigger.

A senior project manager has the experience and expertise to see, and determine, the things that fall outside of the “deploy solution X” box.

To summarize what I am saying, I would simply say that Senior project managers must have the ability to assess the full scope and effect of the project.

Scope and Effect?

We all know that project scope is well-defined in the PMBoK processes, and we all know that it basically refers to specific work that must be done to achieve the project. Yet what I just talked about was well beyond moving servers, and I called it scope and effect. Why, and what does that even mean?

Well, the dimensions in the prior section do translate into the scope of work items that must be in the plan, the right teams engaged, and the specific work mapped out and risks identified and managed.

But these scope items are not explicit in the project definition, yet these things must be done if one is to achieve “no negative impact to the business applications”.

Even More

I haven’t even identified all the dimensions that exist in this example discussion. Because the dimensions I already mentioned are just going to get the business to a place where applications/services merely work. By that, I mean that app-to-app integrations will work, end users can connect, etc.

In addition to that, there is another set of things that come into play from a performance/quality perspective. This is even more important if your server move project also has a consolidation objective. There is the potential for the application performance to suffer.

In addition, there is a political aspect being uncovered because there are bound to be stakeholders who are opposed to consolidations, and if the project fails to identify the performance dimension, when the end state performance is poor those stakeholders will be very vocal with an “I told you so” message.

The only way one can possibly avoid getting to that end game is if the performance dimension is identified, and then further analyzed to define performance in the existing state versus the end state — and gaining consensus across the stakeholders that if the end state demonstrates meeting these metrics, then performance is not degraded.

Once a project team is aware of a performance dimension to their project, the next logical question becomes “how do we get the data we will need to quantify that”?

Again, I would expect a senior project manager to zero in on this and be proactive in defining performance as it exists and determining measurable metrics. Because if this dimension is missed, or not quantified with metrics, it remains a purely subjective matter.

Data-Driven Projects

Just in this short discussion of the non-obvious dimensions of IT projects, we have uncovered a number of areas where data will be needed. Not just from a planning perspective, but ongoing.

Using our example of moving servers, we talked about each server mapping to a business purpose. It would make sense to structure the project such that the server moves that impact the same business processes will be grouped together from planning, risk management, and execution perspectives.

In a perfect world, there would be a one-to-one mapping of servers to applications, but in reality, it is not that clean. Application teams tend to find the provisioning process and cost modelling and chargeback schemes to be something they would rather avoid, and hence they put one server into a number of roles.

One might find that there is an application where server-to-application mappings are defined. In that case, the project will need to feed from that. If not, then the project will need to source its own.

In either case, the project must understand that this is not usually a one-time analysis. The business continues to move even while IT projects are in flight. The project will need to “refresh” the analysis throughout the project lifecycle.

Moreover, it tends to happen that the business continues to have a need for this data even after the project has been completed. Thus, for large projects which touch a significant footprint of the business, it might make sense to purchase products — or the company might already be licensed for the use of certain tools.

Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is an entire area of business analysis which encompasses the tools and techniques used to gather and transform data into something useful or actionable. To some degree, any project manager that managed a project that requires managing data in a spreadsheet is performing business intelligence.

However, most project managers will see no other way of harnessing data which the project must consume, and produce things like status reports. PMOs tend to get bogged down with data gathering and consolidating for project consumption and reporting.

Responsibility for this tends to bounce around between PMOs and the technical teams, with neither accepting it as their job. Yet neither can get their jobs done without it.

For these reasons, I am flat out going to say that in 2021 project managers should be investing in the professional development of their skill sets specifically in data tools and business intelligence. Because data is central to so many projects, it tends to float around without ownership.

This is why I see business analysis skills as being something a senior project manager must master. Yes, excel is powerful and Excel vlookups are a starting point.

If you are a project manager and you are a vlookup master, then I would say you really need to set excel aside and start using database tools. Because that is what vlookups are doing, is joining data sets, and you are using excel to calculate and derive additional fields and business points.

The next step, and that next level, for you, would be to model that data into an SQL database. It used to be the case that in order to use a database you had to ask to purchase something with a significant price tag. But in 2021, you have access to free and open-source software (FOSS), and for SQL database you have Mysql/MariaDB.

Keep in mind that you must consider any policies that exist in your organization regarding installing/using software of this nature. Your company might have a team of database administrators (DBAs) that exist solely to keep you from being productive without a chargeback to their cost centre.

In all seriousness though, rogue database installations can do really bad things to the IT environment and/or the license contracts with other companies, and you do not want to be the reason a business application went down, cyber attackers got into the environment, or you are the reason your organization must now audit all databases and pay a “true up”.

A short discussion with your manager and justifying the use of a real database would be a good starting point.

Business Intelligence Front Ends

Getting your data onto a database back end is a good starting point, but the next consideration becomes how users access/interact with the data and business intelligence you are producing. Of course, one can continue using Excel and using its charting and pivoting, filter/sort features, and link it to the database where you put the data.

For more industrial solutions, there are business intelligence products like Microsoft PowerBI, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), Tableau, Pentaho, and others. Using these tools will get your reports/ visualizations, dashboards, and scorecards into an internal web URL. This makes it a lot easier for you to make and distribute changes — you don’t have to distribute a new Excel file, etc.

When selecting what tools to use, obviously you should consider what products are already in use at your company, since there is a good chance they have bought licenses already. Keep in mind that business intelligence isn’t just an IT project thing, these same tools are used for non-IT things like financial analysis, etc.

Data Automation

The last thing a project manager usually discovers when becoming a skilled BI analyst is the need for automating data flows. Because most projects will have an ongoing need to “refresh” the data. For example, your weekly routine of extracting data from system X, then from system Y, then rationalizing that data so it aligns, and then crunching it to produce metrics for your weekly report — that entire process is a good candidate for automation.

That is the real power behind business intelligence tools, and the skills a senior project manager should have is to automate the data so that the entire thing refreshes daily, or hourly. Not only does that save you time each week, but it also gets the progress out to your stakeholders in a near real-time fashion.

Furthermore, it puts you — the project manager — back in the position of managing the project instead of continuously mining the data.

The pièce de résistance is this: The data solution put into place to support the project will remain, and will likely have business value after the project is in the past. When a future project comes along and leverages this same data, that is awesome.

Hiring Managers

To that point, I’d like to take a look at the hiring managers’ view and talk about how the project and senior project managers should be assessed and ultimately supported.

Since we just talked about it, I will start with data analysis skill sets. You absolutely want your project managers to have data skills. When you see it on a resume, it should register as the kind of project manager you should hire, or want to retain, in 2021.

When your project managers come to you looking for you to support them with approval for database installations, licensing, etc. that is likely very valid and business justified.

Forward-Looking

The way I see project management shaping in the future is with PMOs owning the data and business intelligence that projects draw from. Perhaps it isn’t necessarily going to be project managers with a second hat as data & analytics, it might be skilled BI experts reporting to the PMO.

As I say this, I should point out that I managed a PMO in a professional services organization from 2002 through 2006. The PMO tends to own the major things that feed into projects and methodologies. Just as the PMO tends to own the enterprise project/time tracking tools, I see them eventually owning the business intelligence tools for producing data in support of projects.

In 2021 Data & Analytics are Important Skills for a Project Manager

All that said, I think it is reasonable to say that right now, in 2021 and going into 2022 if project managers are picking the areas where they want to invest in their professional development, choosing business intelligence and data/analytics would be a wise choice.

I often say that in the modern day, your project can only be as good as your data — and your ability to get that data, cleanse it, align it, and transform it into action. Therefore I’d say that focusing on these skills will give a big bang for the buck.

Data often translates into risk identification and/or quantification.