Project Manager and Delegation

As Project Manager you are responsible leader for all project management activities for any project. Delegation of some of your work to others can be necessary, but for the most part it is best to ‘‘delegate’’ all of it. Project manager has to assume that their project management responsibilities will consume around 10 % of their time per contributor on their teams. This time is consumed in project related meetings, communications with stakeholders, problem solving, hand-holding, and other project-related tasks. If your team size is more than nine people (direct reporting) you will not have much bandwidth available to take other assigned activities.

As Project Manager your project is your primary responsibility, but this may not be the only one activity of yours. Including other all activities that creates your overall workload. Also include other interruptions like Organizational meetings that will take your time away from your project. Sometime you have to devote you time to other assigned work on project, while planning your capacity do not schedule more that 90 % of your time in advance. As you have to react faster to problem as they arise.

Even you have some bandwidth available, set habit to delegate all project activities to your team. Treat yourself as last option. Assign only that activities to you which can be interrupted and not critical activities. Your project is your first priority, so don’t assign default critical activity to yourself else you may miss out other priorities.

You may find that you are master for some activities on your team. But yet you should not consider you as first option. Assigning work to your team members and they will develop their skills, and it will leave you open to help and mentor whenever needed.

While working on project sometimes things will not happen as per your plan. The main reason for leaving some bandwidth available for yourself so you will be able to take on emergency work whenever need arises. If a key member is absent due to some emergency then this bandwidth will help you to fill the gap.

Effective project manager are always keep eye on overall project status and ready for balancing the work as complex situation occurred, so that progress can continue more or less as planned. If your default scheduled activities consumes your all capacity, then only one option left that you have to work overtime.

So Delegate the work and have happy life too.

About Author:

Kshitij Yelkar is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: kshitij.yelkar@spluspl.com