In my last poll I asked if a Project manager should be a 'Product / Business Expert' or should he be 'Product / Business Agnostic'. 10 of you had voted of which 7 opined that PM Should be a Product / Business Expert and 3 of you felt that the PM should be Product / Business Independent.
In my current poll, I am expanding on this theme. In this poll I am asking you to tell the world the criteria for choosing a PM for an ERP Project. The options are 'PM Should be a Product Expert', 'PM Should be a Business Expert' and 'Both'.
It goes without saying that PM should be a Project Management Expert.
What do you think? Come on, vote and let the world know. Along with the voting, appreciate if you could comment / elaborate on this point.
2 comments:
A ERP project or for that matter any project is implemented by a team. For a team to be successful, it should have all the needed skills (be it product expertise or business expertise) amongst its team members.
For the PM.. he could be a expert in one or two areas (be it part of the product or aspects of the business or something else) but most importantly.. he should have a high level perspective of what each expert brings to the table. He has to stitch the inputs from all the experts and deliver to the stakeholders what was intended.
Therefore the question of whether the PM should be product expert or business expert becomes inconsequential as long as the required skills exist in the team. The key skill for the PM is to leverage these expertise effectively
Dhruva
I partially agree. In one of the projects that I know, all the required skills existed in the team but the integrative knowledge was not available anywhere. And since the PM was not a product / business expert, he was not able to stitch together that necessary integration. To that extent, in an ERP Project, the PM should have some key skills. ERP is not like another IT Project where PM just need to do People Mgt. ERP need to provide Business Solutions within the framework of the Application and within the constraints imposed by the application. To that extent, the PM needs some expertise either in Business or in Product, preferably the latter.
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