ROLE OF FUNCTIONAL MANAGER IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT?
Project management is the solicitation of skills, knowledge, tools, and techniques to project activities and requirements.
Project management processes come into five groups:
Hence, Functional Manager is a person who is a managing authority over an organizational unit such as a department or within an entity, company, or in an organization and serves for the accomplishment of above mentioned processes.
Similarly, Functional managers bring together the effort of similar people. The resource or functional manager is dedicated for the arrangement and allocation of the resources required for the project. The people who work on the project report to the Functional manager. It is a challenge of the Functional Manager to gain the commitment and cooperation of all project related concerns. That challenge is met most easily by using a participative project management approach.
The critical role of the functional manager is to:
- Review and approve the project plan for their areas.
- Provide people with opportunities to be project team members.
- Provide direction, as and when required, to the team member who represents the concern department.
- Review the project schedule.
- Remove obstacles for the team.
- Ensures that team members are provided with the time to complete the project, as defined in the approved project plan.
- Make sure the people working on the project from the department have the appropriate level of skill and know-how to do the work.
Comparison between Functional manager and project manager to understand the role of functional manager in a better frame
| Functional Manager | Project Manager |
| Allocate project | Assign work for project |
| Discuss how well person is doing that work and if person wants to continue doing it (providing prospects for growth) | Discuss state of work for project |
| Gather information from other Projects Managers to write the conclusions | Provide feedback about work on this project |
| Work with team members to set and coach on career objectives | Work with employee to develop specific skills as they relate to this project |
The role of Functional manager is very crucial to run project flawlessly. Nevertheless, it is primarily job of the Functional Manager, to ensure a firm, composed approach. The considerable contribution of Functional managers is also to attempt to show their team members how to resolve the problems by describing the methods. This makes true sense because they’ve done their jobs earlier and learned lessons doing so. The challenge now is that the value of a leading light (functional Manager) is his/her ability to coach others on how to solve problems themselves.
