At the small to medium size end of the public sector organisational scale (around 500 employees), software projects typically have budgets in the order of £150,000 over four years – excluding internal resource costs.  Such systems may serve around 100,000 customers.

Software project budgets for blue chip companies are often much larger as the workforce and number of customers affected is on a different order of magnitude e.g. 50,000 employees scattered around the globe, with perhaps 5M customers.  Budgets for comparable business systems are therefore in the order of £3M over 4 years in this sector.

PM’s often manage up to five projects at any given time, so when we compare the project portfolio of a medium size org public sector PM to that of a blue chip PM, from a purely financial point of view (£750k vs £15M), the public sector PM project portfolio looks somewhat trivial.

But is the blue chip PM job really more challenging, and worthy of the higher pay packet?

Both PM’s are responsible for delivering their projects on time, on budget and to the desired quality.  The reputation and financial health of their respective organisations depend upon the success or failure of the project.  Both PMs work with a variety of stakeholders – technical and non-technical to deliver the project.

The crucial difference in my opinion is the level of resourcing that each PM can enjoy.  The public sector PM’s that I see work with skeleton crews to deliver their projects – for example there is often no project support team to produce and maintain GANTT charts, meeting minutes, and perform all of the other essential admin tasks.  The public sector PM has to do all of this on top of the leadership / strategic work that a PM fulfills.  I put it to you that public sector PMs have to do more for (and with) less.  Love to hear your thoughts.

You need a thick skin to be a project manager.

Don’t expect to be adored.  If you do the job well you’ll get some colleagues’ (often very senior colleagues’) hackles up by probing into areas where things may be going pear shaped.

Don’t expect any thanks.  You’ll end up doing all sorts of tasks from writing business cases to arranging tea and coffee for meetings and everything in between. You may be disappointed if you’re expecting any thanks for this stuff, even when the jobs you are completing are outside of your remit.

Don’t expect others to treat you as you treat them.  You may have an internal code of conduct that says something like, ‘I will never bitch about someone else without first taking the issue up with them directly in a diplomatic kind of way‘. Not everyone shares your values, and you may find colleagues sharing their opinions of you with your boss without them first addressing their concerns to you!

If you do your job well, nothing will go wrong and people will assume the PM role is easy and possibly superfluous.  Conversely, if you make a dogs dinner of it, you can wow colleagues with your calmness under pressure and heroic, stoic side. Perverse huh.

Despite all this, you couldn’t possibly tempt me to do anything else