When I think of how Project Managers should work, I think of Gordon Ramsay, the famous television chef with twelve stars in Le Guide Michelin. Ramsay is best known for TV programs such as Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, where he dissects failing businesses and people with the same ferocious honesty. He approaches the problem the same way every time. First he tastes the menu, then he analyzes the guests that visit the restaurant, after that he studies how the kitchen prepares its meals, and finally he watches how management goes about their business. No detail is overlooked, no part is forgotten, and he knows exactly why the business fails.

A Project Manager needs to do the same. After assessing the situation, the Project Manager must get every process in place, or the project members will not be empowered, and the project will fail. A Project Manager must thus have detailed knowledge about all development processes in the project, without having the actual technical skill to build the product itself. This cannot be overstated: get the processes in place and make them work! In the best of worlds, project members would know how their own process worked, but this is not reality. In the real world, there are Software Engineers who don’t know how to develop software, Systems Architects who know nothing about requirements, and head chefs who know next to nothing about how a kitchen works. They were trained the wrong way and is now stuck in a bad pattern. You need to be the Gordon Ramsay in your project, without using the f-word.