Throughout my career, a singular question comes up during an introductory conversation: ‘what is it that you do’? The question changes occasionally in the matter in which it’s posed or the context in which it is asked. Numerous variations include:

• ‘Do you represent part of the business team or the technical team’? (organizational approach)
• ‘Are you managing (a reference to a manager who’s transitioned)‘s team now’? (relational approach)
• ‘Are you taking over the (reference to a routine and fruitless communication forum) meetings’? (shot in the dark approach)
• ‘Are you going to fix (a reference to a failed process/system/department in desperate need of change)‘? (a glimmer of hope approach)
• ‘So, what am I responsible for now’? (paranoid, aimless and disgruntle manager approach)
• ‘Don’t you work with computers’? (my wife’s approach)
• ‘What do you do’? (System Architect approach)

Each and every time I’m asked to explain my role, I honestly chuckle inside. These aren’t silly questions, but it lends itself to exactly why I’m having the chat with the curious co-worker in the first place.

Regardless of the industry, or size and shape of the project, a PM’s core function is to manage a project’s communication system. That’s an over-simplified means of describing what can be a very complex and meticulous function. I think of it as a communication network because of the connections between all the involved players. The connections must be maintained, the messages being passed through the connections must be purposeful and directional, and how the recipients respond to the messages must be intentional and productive. The PM manages the rules of this network, how the stakeholders interact, and lots of aspects of the messaging, even though generally they’re not the sources of the messages themselves. How this network is managed is where all the PM tools come into play – project schedules, status reports, budgets, plans, and meetings. And sometimes, lots of meetings… I’ve not met a single Manufacturing Engineer or Quality Analyst who’s told me, “Bobby, thanks for inviting me to another meeting”. The meetings, however, are a means to an end – to keep everyone informed, focused, and engaged. And when my team members miss my meetings, they can refer to my status reports, revert to 1 on 1 phone calls, show up to beginning of day huddles, and look forward to fly-by chats in the office cafeteria.

A Project Manager provides several other capacities, but managing the project’s system of communication I think has the biggest impact on the success of a project.