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December 7, 1998

Project Managers Learn Value Of Business Skills

As projects become larger, managers must keep tabs on the competition

By Jennifer Mateyaschuk

azel Malek, an IT project manager at CheckFree Corp., a provider of electronic-commerce processing products and services, works hard to stay current on the latest technologies. But Malek is spending an increasing amount of time honing her business skills by attending conferences, reading books, and visiting online project-management forums. She also plans to go back to school for a master's degree in project management.

Just as CIOs have needed to develop business skills over the past few years, IT project managers are finding they need to understand business issues and practices as well as technology. That's because large projects require business skills, and because project managers must know the needs of not just their own company, but those of suppliers and partners.

Gartner Group says the skills within a company's IT department will shift from 65% technology-related today to 65% business- and IT management-related by 2002. Project managers will be in the vanguard of that change.

"Project managers are becoming more like movie producers," says Ron Schevlin, a senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. "The project manager doesn't necessarily direct the picture, but he or she makes sure the funding is there, the right skills are used in the right places at the right times, and the projects are completed on time and within budget."

Much of the change in a project manager's job stems from shifting business relationships, according to Schevlin and other IT analysts. Companies are creating applications that allow them to share information with partners and suppliers.

"These applications can't just meet a business' needs, but must also be appealing to users outside the company as well," says Schevlin. "That's why it's so important for project managers to have the business skills that will let them understand the customers and suppliers as well as the internal users." Recruiters say project managers with both technical and business skills can earn as much as 25% more than project managers who have only technical skills. They also tend to get heftier bonuses, according to recruiters.

Malek earned a bachelor's degree in humanities from London University and was trained as a Cobol programmer at Prudential. Before joining CheckFree, in Norcross, Ga., last January, she was a mainframe specialist, program analyst, and quality-assurance analyst. When CheckFree assigned her to manage a team developing a graphical user interface application--an area in which she had little experience--she had to develop business skills to motivate her subordinates, solve problems, and understand the business case for the application.

Keep The Pace
Last year, CheckFree processed more than 85 million electronic transactions worth $15 billion for some 2.5 million merchants and 1.5 million consumers. Malek says the company is growing so rapidly it's sometimes hard to keep pace. Using traditional business processes in the IT department has helped.

"Originally, a client would come to us and tell us what kind of E-commerce application they wanted, but we never created any formal documentation to outline those needs," says Malek. By expanding the role of project management throughout the enterprise, Malek is working to initiate a process to create a scope document that would outline all of the details of the project and then enable the company to put in a quality-assurance plan.

This will help her see what aspects of a project could help other clients as well as help to make sure projects stay within budget and are delivered on time. Says Malek, "I need to know what impact any given project has on another in order to maximize customer satisfaction and our own efficiency."