Brett Harned is one of the best project managers I’ve ever known. I have the pleasure of working with him at Happy Cog, and getting to watch his skills put to work for the benefit of our team and the client team alike.
Despite being an adamantly behind-the-scenes kind of guy, he recently started blogging about the ins and outs of being a PM (after much urging), and is already imparting many a-nugget of wisdom to the masses. If you work on the web (and even if you don’t), it’s definitely worth adding his Adventures in Project Management to your feed reader.
Brett is publishing a series of Q&As with web professionals on the value they believe a project manager brings to the team, and I had the honor of being the first interview. It’s a pretty lengthy post, but I hope people will find my perspective interesting.
My answer to one of his questions:
A good project manager makes the team look wonderful and makes the project and its outcome better; a bad project manager makes the team look bad, the work product terrible, and wastes the client’s time and money.
Read Working with PMs: A Q&A with Whitney Hess
Many thanks to Brett for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts on the subject!
[This seems to have resonated with my friend Jeremy Kutner, website Project Manager and Producer at Atlantic Record. Rock on!]
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Loving the new comic infusion Whit. I’m hoping to be lucky enough to work with a great PM some day.
May I suggest that the prioritization of what a good PM does should be slightly different. For example, consider that a 2nd lieutenant leading a platoon is in many ways a project manager. The lieutenant’s mission is to make the project come out better (e.g. complete the mission and bring the troops come home alive). Making the team/platoon look good should be strictly a secondary consideration – in the field or when reviewing form fields.