1. The developers and editors and designers don’t want to schedule and set up meetings. This involves a lot of back and forth between calendar shuffling and conference room re-booking, running meetings, assigning and following up on action items, nagging people and sending out brief but useful meeting notes. They just don’t want to deal with all that. Great PMs do all this effortlessly so that team members can just show up to the meeting, participate and leave and get it all summarized in a nice wiki page or email or basecamp message.
2. No one wants to handle the interpersonal conflicts and confrontations. Conversations are often needed regarding team members not performing, vendors not doing their work, stakeholders who ignore multiple requests for design approvals or attendance for prototype demos, or clients who refuse to play by the established project process, etc.
3. Your PM is the glue that keeps every project team member on the same page and keeps them on schedule with their particular task. The PM is also the oil that keeps the machine moving, keeping an eye out on dev tasks being worked on, while making sure work is staggered and assigned correctly so the QA team also has work to do by established QA dates, and that the designers and the tech writers and so forth are getting the necessary input and sign-offs from the right people to get their work done. Your PM is the supreme juggler who knows what to toss first and what to toss last – the balls, flaming torches, knives and live rabbits never fall and that is why the project comes in on-time.
4. The PM is used to doing all kinds of grunt work. Any work that any team member deems, “That’s not my job,” the PM almost always will simply, quietly do it for the team. The only exception is WHEN it is actually someone’s work that they are just not doing out of laziness! I’ve met PMs who have done everything from running meetings, to creating customized reporting for various upper management and clients, to photocopying to on-boarding new hires to coding and testing and writing copy to buying and delivering food and drinks to a team working late.
5. The Tech PM has the added advantage of having been a developer before and hence knows, generally, how long certain dev tasks take and it is less likely the tech team can pull one over her. “No dude, I KNOW it does not take a month to build a 3-page static site. Seriously. I can do it right now in 3 hours. Want to revise that estimate for me?”
6. Your PM is the face of the project and will deal with all the prickly and bossy and curious people no one else on the team wants to talk to: marketing folks, senior management, other non-project team folks on other projects who are just nosy.
7. Your PM can summarize the project into interesting bits that are targeted to the right audience. If the PM is talking to Operations about setting up a midnight release, she will use the right words to make sure Operations knows why it is important for them to get the coverage for that night. If the PM is talking to editorial, or advertising sales or customer service, she will deal in the right lingo, tasty nuggets, and enticing descriptions to get those parties on board in just the right way.
8. Your PM religiously looks at calendars months ahead and can tell you the dates of every monday of this month or who is on vacation three weeks from now, and how many resources will be free or busy in any time frame. Two of the PM’s responsibilities is resource management and time management — do you want your other team members splitting up these tasks? Your PM has both an aerial and on-the-ground view of the project at any given moment.
9. The PM’s door/cube is always open. Sure, she may have just returned to her desk for the first time today after having had 5 back-to-back meetings and no lunch yet but if you show up with a question about a bug ticket or a work breakdown task, she will greet you with a smile, say “Sure, I’ve got time to talk,” pull up a chair and dig up that item for you on the wiki, all ready to answer your questions. You are her priority and she is never too busy for you…even if this is the fifth time she has answered your questions about the same issue.
10. The PM gets people together. Things do not languish in email threads or unanswered IM messages or voice mails. She will grab the offending parties, bring them together in a meeting, a conference call, the office pantry, or for after work drinks and work this out once and for all. Because nothing is more painful for her than people on the same team who can’t seem to understand what “working together productively” means.