Project Manager: Role and Responsibilities
The Role of a Project Manager in the App Development Process
In this week's blog, we’re going to dive into the role and responsibilities of a project manager (PM) in app development. At Poeta, PMs are essential in delivering quality services to our clients.
So what is a project manager? A project manager or PM is an individual who is responsible for overseeing projects and ensuring they are completed smoothly. Primarily, PMs have three things they need to be concerned with: predicting risks, detecting problems, and solving problems.
Outside of their three main areas of concern, PMs have many other responsibilities, such as estimations, project staffing, coordination, mitigation, quality checks, and delivery. Let’s look at each of these responsibilities in more detail.
Estimations
Estimations are the first step in providing quality services and set the tone for the entire project. Estimations involve Poeta’s PMs analyzing the project—estimating how long it may take, how many people need to make up the team, and the overall costs.
Project staffing
Once the client approves the estimation costs, the next step is to staff the project accordingly. Choosing the right employee for the right role is essential to the success of the product or service. The goal of the PM is to ensure that the capabilities of the team member match what the client has detailed in the scope of work. Should a team member be assigned to the wrong position, the PM needs to closely oversee the work or substitute another team member.
Coordination
Throughout the project, communication between the client, team members, and any support staff is facilitated by the PM. Fluid communication helps Poeta helps keep the client updated on the project status and ensure that agreed-upon deadlines are met. For Poeta, client relationships always come first, and as such, we see good communication as a primary PM responsibility.
Mitigation
It is the PM’s responsibility to make sure that any escalations are dealt with as calmly and as smoothly as possible.
In app development, there are three kinds of risks that are dealt with by the PM. First are technical risks that occur when the implementation of a project system does not work as originally planned. These risks can occur when the project gets too complex for the available technology
Operational or management risks make up the second risk. These risks occur when the structure of a project is not clear. Since operational/management risks can occur as a result of inadequate communication among team members, PMs are responsible for clearing up any misunderstandings that arise during the process. Operational risks can also occur when there are insufficient resources for project or software development, and failure in addressing any priority conflicts. It is the PM’s responsibility to manage all of these risks.
Scheduling risks occur when the potential or current project takes longer than expected to complete. Scheduling risks are fairly common when it comes to the app development industry, but at Poeta we try to mitigate the severity of scheduling risks by estimating the timeline as accurately as possible with the input of our PMs.
Quality checks
In app development, quality is key. At Poeta, we pride ourselves in the quality of our app development work. It is our PM’s responsibility to check for any bugs or issues that arise before presentation of a project to the client.
Timely delivery
Our clients are like family and we depend on our expert PMs to fulfill our mandate to our them by ensuring that the team associated with the project meets all deliverables on time and to, if not beyond, expected standards.
As the result of the exceptional work of our PMs, Poeta has an extensive list of case studies showing client-focused work that delivered on every expectation. If you have any questions ab out our capacity to deliver or need other information, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We are more than happy to welcome you to the Poeta family!