One thing that you'll have to be aware of is the difference between project proposal management and the implementation of project management. As a project management president, you'll have to deal with both, but you will have to keep them distinct. You'll have to use wise judgment to assign the right projects to the right project management professional under you. And, you'll have to manage your project managers so that they are concerned about more than ''just getting the job done''. As a company division president, you'll have to be aware that projects usually fail not because of technical difficulties, but because of issues with the people involved in them.
As a project management president, you will need to keep watch over your project managers and their teams to keep a sharp lookout for things like conflicts of interest, murky goals, and role-expectations leading to underperformance, bad leadership, low quality of or motivation for teamwork, and just a general lack of enthusiasm for the project. So, you'll need to have a high skill level for addressing the people management problems which will inevitably crop up. For this, you'll have to have an understanding of different types of individuals, who you are likely to be found in a large corporation, for any one of these people may end up on one of your project managers' teams.
Presently, more and more efforts are put into understanding human personalities, behavior, and work habits that are to be found in the business world. Individual personalities could at once complement each other and conflict with each other. This is an extremely important thing for the project management professional to know, since most of the time project teams have to collaborate, not just collate their different assignments, to one degree or another on any given project. As the project management president, you'll be the court of final authority in constructing teams and aligning them with managers and projects while taking into consideration each person's unique set of strengths and weaknesses. If you are as knowledgeable as you should be, you'll assert a positive influence on the project team and thus increase the likelihood of having a successful project that helps make the company more profitable.
Now, one thing that you'll want to be keenly aware of is looking out for the temptation to build an ''Alpha Team.'' This would be a team whose manager and role players are culled from the most intelligent and talented people in your company or division. Ironically, most of the time, this Alpha Team will fail on completing the project correctly. There are just too many conflicts of interest, and most of the individual egos are too inflated with self-importance. These people work brilliantly when alone or around others of ''lesser'' ability, but put together on one team they start competing with each other instead of competing with your company's competition. These conflicts of interest rip the team apart instead of bringing people together to have a successful project.
As project manager president, therefore, you will need to know that you should seek and will never have a ''perfect'' project team. Furthermore, your array of project teams should be planned out and put together during project proposal preparation stages. Too many people do all of the planning and resource allocating for a new project first and then try to put a team together almost like an afterthought. This is a mistake. You should take the chance to find common threads between the project planning and those who will carry out its mission as soon as possible. As the project management president, you will need to take ultimate responsibility for cultivating a project team's work culture and get everyone on the same page and motivated to achieve the same objective.
Conflicts between a project's timetable and resource allocation and the manager and team members are inefficient and can always be avoided if all things are planned for right from the start, including personnel. Once you have your project manager and his/her team put together, they can then clearly specify their particular resource needs to the line management right away. This also makes it far easier for you to be able to authorize any necessary improvisational efforts that so often emerge once a project enters the thick of things. You will need to understand how to develop and then adjust team men power loading charts as well as resource allocation charts.
As you can see, a project management president for a corporation must have superior leadership, communication, and analysis abilities. You'll need to have an MBA or equivalent (or higher) degree and some amount of experience being a project manager. You should also take project management courses offered by your company or a local or online university.
Project management presidents earn an average of $86,000 a year in pay, compensation that is 35% higher than the U.S. national average for all jobs in all industries.
