The New Professional Project Managers

Until recently, a technical profile and some experience were enough for a Project Manager. Thus, although these Project Directors had an ideal profile for defining and meeting project objectives, they could lack many other skills and knowledge necessary to ensure effective management.

In a complicated environment such as R, intrinsically linked to uncertainty, Project Managers are required to define objectives, a schedule, milestones, and a budget to develop a technology that often has not even been discovered yet.

In this environment, today’s Project Managers are required to have many other professional qualities: organizational skills, leadership, negotiation skills, responsiveness, effective communication, strategic vision, ease of decision-making…

Furthermore, collaborative European R projects are complex, involving different types of organizations from various sectors, which also come from different countries with their own culture and background. Thus, Project Managers are also required to have language skills, knowledge of funding programs and their regulations, or financial management knowledge.

Within this framework, the role of the R Project Manager has become professionalized, just as Project Managers in other sectors have. So much so that companies currently rely on professional Project Managers from consulting firms capable of offering personnel with the required qualities and experience. This fact is not surprising, as except in the case of large-scale companies, it is not easy for a company to obtain European funding for several projects and thus train professionals with extensive experience in this type of project. Likewise, having a Professional Project Manager allows the company to focus on technical leadership and have the strategic vision necessary to maximize the return on its R investment.

However, the added value of a Professional Project Manager is not sufficiently recognized by European institutions. So much so that Horizon 2020 does not allow the subcontracting of these services, even when effective project management has been shown to have a decisive impact on the development and results of the project.

The EAIC, the European Association of Innovation Consultants, has prepared a Manifesto that seeks to gather support to alert the European Commission about the proper consideration of project management in the next Horizon Europe, so that professional project management services are recognized.

You will find more information about this Manifesto and the possibility of giving your support to it at the following link: https://www.eaic.eu/manifesto.html

Paloma Fonseca

2021-01-27