Cherish a good project manager

This article has been prompted by two events this week. First of all, silicon.com received an email from a reader interested in getting hold of a tailored version of this year's Skills Survey results. He wanted an analysis of the stats based on respondents who said they are project managers. Now we certainly asked about project management skills in our poll - but there was no 'Project Manager' option when it came to asking respondents for their job title.

Which leads us on to the second event. At a roundtable debate yesterday, silicon spoke to one of SAP UK's heads of consulting, a man in charge of 32 managers responsible for getting projects delivered properly and on time. He was interested in whether silicon.com users - the people his team will often work with - see project management as a profession in its own right or something people do.

He has a good point. We all know project managers at our places of work who were trained as engineers, accountants, programmers or who are from a range of operational titles. Our survey - arguably wrongly - assumed today people consider themselves IT managers or CIOs first, and project managers second.

But looking at job adverts or speaking to recruitment consultants is enough to show the roll 'project manager' is alive and thriving in its own right. In short, it's a career.

We'd argue that in a world of increasingly complex projects, and pressure to show the business benefits of every IT investment, project management has never been as important as it is now.

A look at the silicon.com Skills Survey 2003 results on the surface doesn't prove this. In line with nearly all skills - with one or two exceptions such as 'Linux' - demand for project management expertise has declined. It was cited by 34.6 per cent of our 3,830 respondents as a key missing skill in 2003 compared with 35.7 per cent in 2002.

But the fact that over a third of the respondents still identify it as an important ingredient is instructive. An analysis of our respondents who told us they are IT directors or CIOs is even more enlightening. These IT bosses - arguably the most in touch, along with MDs, with the importance of making investments pay off - really do value a good project manager, with 52.7 citing this as a key attribute in demand. That's by far the most sought after of any skill (next best are 'leadership' with 29.7 per cent and 'Programming languages (C variants, Java, VB, HTML, XML etc)' with 28.5 per cent).

If you're a project manager and you've come from an IT background, let us know - when you're at a wedding and a distant relative asks you what you do, which of the two do you baffle them with?

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