In the last installment of this series, I reiterated four key pillars a best-in-class product manager drives:

1. Policy – The governing corporate and regulatory rules a business system must align and adhere to
2. People – The skills and knowledge humans need to enable a business system
3. Process – The human activities required both with and without technology to enable a business system
4. Technology – The automation required to enable a business system

The article focused on manual, technology-assisted, and technology-exclusive process components and the role the best-in-class product manager plays in ensuring all components are incorporated into the business system. Next up is the technology pillar.

Of the four pillars, the technology pillar is likely the most familiar to a product manager. A best-in-class product manager can understand the why as articulated by a business owner, translate it into a business system what, and ensure the technological how developed by engineers aligns to the what and satisfies the why.

It’s also important that a product manager has an eagle-eyed view of things that can adversely impact technology development and can proactively mitigate or quickly respond when bad things happen. Having that eagle-eyed view is key to being considered a best-in-class product manager.

To better support the eagle-eyed premise, here are some nuggets to consider:

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

As a young manager, I was involved in a significant crisis which had the attention of not only the partners in the firm but also its CEO. I, like many of my cohorts, was nervous about the crisis, its impact on our clients, and my employment status at the firm. There was a very senior partner who was tasked by the CEO to assume responsibility for navigating the firm through the crisis. It took us a year to work our way out of the crisis; and we all learned some valuable nuggets. I thought I was a good leader before the crisis. Now I realize how naïve I was in my assessing my leadership skills. That experience, while excruciatingly painful, was an inflection point in putting me on the path to becoming a better leader.

Some time back, I worked as a project management consultant with a client on some of their large projects. This client had a dedicated change management (CM) organization that recently purchased a methodology from a CM service provider.

All the PMs in the organization were required to go through training on the methodology. The training itself was good in that it helped underscore concepts and level-set on terminology. Included in the methodology was an out-of-the-box project plan that the CM organization wanted the PMs to adopt.

It was very difficult to get the PMs to adopt the methodology because the stock plan didn’t align well with how PMs were used to planning projects. The stock plan tried to include non-CM tasks to be more standalone-like, which made adoption more difficult. The methodology got a bad rap because of the incongruency of the stock plan with how PMs planned out projects. Unfortunate.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.