You have decided to “enter IT” and want to become a project manager. Or maybe you already work in the industry and are thinking about changing your specialization. Stop! Before making a fateful decision, evaluate all the pros and cons of this role. After all, the work of PM is not suitable for everyone. In this article, we have collected the pros and cons of this profession.
A project manager is a person who has control over the product development process. He is an evil general and the team’s best friend, a loyal customer advisor, and a wonderful communicator, a fearless firefighter, and a good tactician. PM leads the project from the day of its initiation until the last hour of the contract for technical support. Why is he doing this? We have compiled a list.
Why to choose this profession?
It is almost impossible to reach your ceiling in digital project management because the IT-sphere develops faster than a person breathes or blinks. Moreover, to remain competitive in the IT field, PM must constantly develop, otherwise it loses its relevance, and hence money.
? Effective management of your life
No time management training will teach you how to write a plan for the day and stick to it as cool as managing five projects at work. Sometimes, a project manager is forced to drink water, breathe, and even blink on schedule.
?Empathy and emotional intelligence
The ability to understand and accept one’s feelings, the feelings of colleagues, and to work effectively with one’s own and others’ emotional manifestations are precisely the skills that distinguish a true team leader in any market. In other words, if you can understand why a colleague is yelling at work, you can accept his feelings and calm him down, then you definitely will not have problems with your parents, half or even children.
?Decision-making skill
Managers of any sphere are people on whose shoulders the responsibility for making decisions always lies. In other words, PM is always extreme. Therefore, when something is burning on a project – deadlines, a programmer’s laptop, the customer’s nerves – the project manager cannot just sit, he must extinguish the ignited object. When the skill of effective and measured firefighting becomes reflexive, decision making outside of working hours is also no longer overly difficult.
Dark side
☹ A lot of stress
From the outside, it seems as if the project manager during the day is not immersed in any process with his head and, therefore, he has nothing to get tired of. But PM, like a switch, accepts a large amount of information as input, processes it, and gives it to the final destination. Not surprisingly, by the end of the day, a manager wants to have a rest. In moments of stress on the project, information flows also acquire an emotional color, which the manager passes through himself and this also does not pass without a trace.
☹ You can’t concentrate on one task
In the case of project managers, the law of meanness works in this way: as soon as the PM gathers his thoughts, exhales, and starts writing a long letter to the customer, a computer explodes nearby, the customer from another project comes up with a brilliant idea, the senior programmer is knocked down by a bus and further down the list. Often a manager solves problems in parallel with writing a letter. At the next re-reading of this letter, PM has to delete what was written and start working again.
We hope the article was useful!