In September 2010, we held a survey for Project Managers and Non-Project Managers. These enabled contributors to answers questions and provide comments on the project management profession. We have long held an opinion that Project Managers and Non-Project Managers in commercial organisations have different opinions about the value of, skills of, and necessary traits in successful projects managers. We were interested to see if these hypotheses were true and if we could understand the root of this difference in opinions. To make the survey practical we kept ourselves to a reasonably short set of question, but even so we believe we have gained some interesting and useful insights.

How the survey was run

The survey was run on a number of websites, related mostly to project management and/or technology. We received help from the following sources: Pawel Brodzinski from Pawel Brodzinski on Software Project Management, Mansi Bhatia from First Impressions, Robert Dempsey from Atlantic Dominion Solutions, Michael Pietroforte from 4 SysOps, the The PPM Community Daily, the team from 7 Tutorials and the team from TinyHacker.

The survey was also published on twitter, with help from the following people: Daniel H. Pink, Scott Berkun, Abhijeet Mukherjee, Mihai Dragomirescu, and Andrew Welch.

We would like to thank the people who helped spread the word. Your help is highly appreciated.

Profiles of contributors

• The total sample size was 144.
• The sample represented an experienced group (68.8% with 7 or more years of experience, only 7.6% with under 3 years).
• There was a strong bias towards North America and Europe (86.8% of the total group).
• Almost a third of the respondents are Non-Project Managers.
• The sample is biased towards IT /software development types (57.6%). Otherwise a broad spread of professions

The details of the profiles are shown in the diagrams and tables below.

Overall importance of Project Managers to organisations

To rate the importance Project Managers have in their organisations, we asked the following questions:

• How important are Project Managers to the delivery of your organisation's goals?
• Overall, how would you rate your experience of working with Project Managers? – Question for Non-Project Managers.
• How highly do you think Project Managers are rated by your organisation? – Question for Project Managers.

Our take on the results:

• Project managers rate their importance to the organisation as higher than Non-Project Managers, but the difference is smaller than we expected.
• In terms of project manager’s perception of how they are rated versus non-project manager’s experience of working with Project Managers, the scores are similar.
• Both “sides” seem to agree that Project Managers have a relatively high importance in the delivery of their organisation’s goals.
• The experience people have when working with Project Managers is a mixed bag. The scores (3.2/3.3) tend to indicate that a good portion of the respondents did not have a great experience.

Traits required by Project Managers

This table shows the rankings set by our audience for each of the traits and highlights where there is a mismatch between Non-Project Managers and Project Managers.

In addition, contributors to the survey were able to add their own traits which they felt were important for Project Managers. The contributors provided the following additional traits (each one was nominated by one contributor only).

Our take on the results:

• It seems quite surprising how well the views of the Project Managers and Non-Project Managers correlate. Each sample group agreed on what the top 3 traits. This tends to indicate a strong shared perspective on the importance of key traits to project management.
• The top trait is communication skills. This is something we have thought for a long time and we think it is good to see it reinforced by the results.
• Although it is the 2nd most important thing, we are somewhat surprised at the score for ability to get things done. We had assumed that 100% would put this down as an important trait for PMs. For the 20%+ of the sample who did not regard this as important – what do they see as Project Managers’ role we wonder?
• We also find it interesting that fewer Project Managers think specialised knowledge in the field which they manage projects is relevant than Non-Project Managers. This aligns with one of the regular comments from Non-Project Managers that they dislike the fact that Project Managers do not have enough expertise in the subject matter area.
• Project managers seem to rate confidence as a very important trait, more important than specialised knowledge in the field which they manage projects. This raises an important gap between Project Managers and the people who work with them on projects.
• Although the numbers are small, it is also interesting to see the additional traits that Project Managers and Non-Project Managers added to the list – i.e. the non-template, freeform answers. Some humorous, all interesting!

General comments on Project Managers

These questions provided a freeform text entry field, so the results are not a statistical or numerical analysis, only a subjective assessment of the comments. It is worth noting the following general comments:

• There are lots of comments which seem to reflect individual gripes or painful experiences. No overall conclusions can be drawn from these.
• The Non-Project Managers seem to fall into two categories - those who see Project Managers dealing with all the small details, and those who see them as the people with the big picture view.

Your feedback on this survey or the results

We are really interested to hear your views on the survey, the results or our analysis of it. We hope to run something like this again, and any comments on how we can improve the survey or different things that might be interesting to find out would be great.

We also summed everything up in a document which you can easily download and use. So don't hesitate to check out the PDF below.

Related content:

Study on the Image of the Project Management Profession