Summary of Solomn

1. What we do know tends to offer a portrait of successful project managers as strong leaders, possessing a variety of problem-solving, communication, motivational, visionary, and team-building skills.

2. Senior managers in many companies readily acknowledge the ad hoc manner in which most project managers acquire their skills, but they are unsure how to better develop and provide for a supply of well-trained project leaders for the future.

3. Though much has been written on how to improve the process of project management, less is known about the sorts of skills and challenges that specifi cally characterize project managers.

4. They often belatedly discover that they simply do not have suffi cient numbers of the sorts of competent project managers who are often the key driving force behind successful product or service development.

5. Increasingly technically complex products and processes, vastly shortened time-to-market windows, and the need for cross-functional expertise make project management an important and powerful tool in the hands of organizations that understand its use.

6. Effective project managers often operate less as directive and autocratic decision makers than as facilitators, team members, and cheerleaders.

7. But the expanded use of such techniques is not always being met by a concomitant increase in the pool of competent project managers.

8. Our goal is to offer some guidelines for an accidental profession, based on our own experiences and interviews with a number of senior project managers—most of whom had to learn their own lessons the hard way.

9. In effect, the characteristics we look for in project managers are varied and diffi cult to pin down.

10. First, few formal or systematic programs exist for selecting and training project managers, even within fi rms that specialize in project management work.

11. Because of these and other limitations on the fl exibility and power of project managers,...