Be a diligent, respectful, and caring steward

If you ask hundreds of project team members what they think about the project managers they’ve met in their career, at least some of them would tell you horror stories about annoying project managers who didn’t understand anything about the work and only bossed people around and had unrealistic expectations of them. For some reason, you can hear a lot of these sad stories in IT development projects, which is a reason why some of the newer methods in IT development are against having a central project manager role.

On the other hand, we’ve all seen many organizations where they appoint the most senior expert as the project manager because of their deep expertise in technical aspects. Many even think that a good technical expert must be promoted to a (project) manager sooner or later. In these cases, the organization loses a great technical expert and gains a mediocre manager.