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What is a typical day in project management?

Reflect on the skills that project managers should have to be able to deal with the variety of project constraints.
12.1
So, there is no real typical day in project management it’s a really varied role and that’s one of the great things about it. So in any given day I could be attending meetings and there is a heck of a lot of that so I could be meeting with stakeholders, with senior sponsors, with the business customers. Certainly, in an agile environment, I would be meeting daily in a scrum meeting with my team on a daily basis during the sprint phases.
33.2
I could be doing a lot of documentation, there’s a lot of admin involved in being a project manager and a lot of organisation, so I could be producing a report for the board or a report for my project team to be working with the work packages. I could be getting quite hands on, so I might be out there capturing requirements or looking at processes and process re-engineering so a super varied role. So a typical day for a project manager at the University will be about planning the project, checking progress against the project plan, working with the project team.
65.3
So, a lot of the day will be spent liaising with the team members to see how they are getting on with the workload, what progress they’ve made, any risks or issues that they’ve identified and then reporting all of that back to the project management board at regular intervals.

In the previous activity, we saw that finding an adequate definition for a project can be problematic. If we now consider a person involved in managing projects, this can introduce a further level of potential ambiguity.

Some roles have the title ‘project manager’ and as such are easy to identify. Other examples may not be so obvious. For instance, organising the Glastonbury festival in the UK is a project, and even though the festival organisers may not give themselves the title of the project manager, many people would recognise it as highly appropriate for what they must do to deliver that event.

At this stage, we will define a project manager as an individual who has responsibility for an activity that fits one of the definitions of the project mentioned earlier.

Your task

Listen to practitioners talking about their experience of managing and delivering projects.
Discuss the different activities that project managers need to undertake to successfully manage and deliver projects.
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Foundations of Project Management

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