The Perfect Project Manager

By Mary Brandel

August 6, 2001 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Good IT project managers are hard to find - and opinions vary as to the best ways (and best places) to find them. Computerworld contributing writer Mary Brandel asked two industry veterans to discuss the traits they desire most in project managers and the best way to find people with those characteristics.

John Oliver, deputy CIO at True
North Communications Inc.

John Oliver is deputy CIO and vice president of critical business systems at Chicago-based True North Communications Inc., one of the world's top 10 global advertising and communications holding companies.
George Nassef is CIO at Hotjobs.com, a leading Internet-based recruiting company in New York.

Project management is a field that requires people with competencies in three subject areas: technology, business and behavior. Ideally, you'd want to hire a project manager with all three traits, but if you had to choose only two, which would they be?
Oliver: I would rather have the candidate without the IT background, as he or she would be far more likely to deliver a solution that will meet the business needs than a technical person with little understanding of the business. At the same time, he or she will need a strong technical person on the project team to help communicate with the technical staff.
Nassef: I'd choose technology and behavior. In order to motivate IT workers, you need an understanding of the challenges they face, in addition to an understanding of human behavior and how to motivate teams. Unless the project is of an enormous scale, the business understanding would be handled above the project manager; that is, the business goals would already be translated into project goals.

George Nassef, CIO at Hotjobs.com

There's an IT project that absolutely must be completed on time, and you learn that the project manager has been taking short-cuts on testing to meet the deadline. You can see that it has put the project on schedule, and the code seems to work well. Do you intervene?
Oliver: Yes. Ultimately, this requires a risk assessment: Is the risk of missing the project deadline greater than that of bringing up a system that will have problems that good testing would reveal? I would pull together the management team that sponsored and/or is impacted by the project and let them decide whether to delay the project. Ultimately, this is a business decision, not a technical one.
Nassef: I would intervene because one of the tenets of project management is communicating in all directions, so there shouldn't be any surprises. The

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