In the end, there will only be one left ... as Project Manager

Alla fine ne rimarrà solo uno
Eventually only one will remain

Some considerations on the decision of some companies to put an IT project manager and a business manager with shared responsibilities on a single project.

It has happened to me several times in the past to find myself working in projects that were assigned to two project managers, one for the IT part and the other for the Business part. At the time, I wasn't able to pinpoint exactly what was wrong with this kind of approach, but after studying different methodologies and getting Prince2 certification first and PMP later, I came to the following conclusions:

  1. Neither Prince 2 nor the Project Management Institute consider the possibility that there are two Project Managers on a project.
  2. Even assuming that there may be a Business project manager and an IT project manager on a project, it is necessary that one of the two is also responsible for the work of the other.
  3. The Business generally does not have project management skills and therefore the business part of the project is not managed with a methodological approach.

Explanations

  1. Two project managers cannot exist but there can be a project management team within which there are specialists such as a risk manager or a planning expert. Or there may be the owners of the work packages. In this case, business activities can be considered work packages within the project and assigned to business managers.
  2. The possibility that there are two project managers who split the project on the basis of whether an activity is business or IT can function at the coordination level as long as the responsibility for controlling the project is assigned to only one person. Not two, not three. Let's stop being Italians!
  3. Project management is a discipline that generally uses those who build things and that in the society we live in are often computer applications, so project management is seen as a technical discipline. Hence the fact that the knowledge of project management methodologies and their usefulness still eludes most business managers today.

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