Do You Need A Project Manager Or A Better Board

Teams reach this fork regularly: work keeps slipping, and the choice looks like hiring a project manager or fixing the board. The useful split is simple. Tooling fixes problems of visibility. A person fixes problems of judgement and negotiation. If you cannot see the work, buy a board. If you can see it perfectly and it still goes wrong, hire.

Most teams are somewhere in between, so here is a way to tell which side you are actually on.

Problems a better board can fix

These are information problems. A well maintained board handles them:

• Nobody knows who is doing what right now
• Work arrives through four channels and some of it gets lost
• Status updates take an hour to assemble each week
• Two people did the same thing because neither could see the other
• Dates exist but nobody knows which ones have moved

If your list of complaints is mostly the above, a person will spend their first six months building the board you could have bought. That is an expensive way to buy software. If you do buy, add one module at a time rather than the whole suite.

Problems only a person can fix

These are judgement problems. No board solves them:

• Priorities genuinely conflict and someone has to decide, then defend the decision
• A client keeps adding scope and nobody is willing to say no
• Two teams disagree about a dependency and neither will move
• Estimates are consistently optimistic and nobody has the standing to challenge them
• Bad news does not travel upwards until it is too late

The last one is the clearest signal. If problems are visible on the board and still nobody acts on them, the missing thing is a person with the authority and the inclination to raise it. Software cannot do that.

The diagnostic

Take the last three things that went wrong. For each, ask: at the moment it started going wrong, was the information available to someone?

• Information was not available: tooling problem
• Information was available and nobody looked: partly tooling, partly habit
• Information was available, someone looked, and nothing happened: people problem

Three of the third kind means hire. Three of the first means buy. A mix means fix the board first, because it is faster and it makes the case for the hire much clearer if you still need one.

The comparison nobody puts on paper

Write both options as annual costs before deciding.

For the hire: the salary you would actually offer for the seniority you need, plus recruitment cost, plus the ramp up period where output is low, plus the equipment and management time. Then ask how long it takes to replace them if they leave in year two.

For the tooling: the annual per seat cost across everyone who needs access, plus setup time valued honestly, plus the weekly maintenance someone will do, plus training. Work through the per seat questions before you trust that first number.

The numbers will be specific to your company, so run them yourself rather than trusting a general claim. What the exercise usually reveals is that tooling is a smaller and more reversible bet, and that a project manager is a much larger commitment than the salary line alone suggests.

There is also a third option people skip: give an existing senior person part of their week for this, explicitly, with the authority that goes with it. Cheaper than a hire, more effective than a board, and it tells you within a quarter whether the role is really needed.

Do not hire someone to maintain a spreadsheet

The worst outcome is hiring a project manager whose actual job becomes chasing people for updates and retyping them into a status document. That is a well paid data entry role, and good people leave it.

If you do hire, buy the tooling first or at the same time, so the person arrives to a system rather than a vacuum. Whatever you pick should answer, on one screen, who is doing what and by when. If your planning is affected by leave and staffing, it helps if work and people records sit together rather than in two separate tools, which is the idea behind SicherOne. Other vendors approach the same problem through connections between systems. Either way, do not make the new hire the connection.

Buy tooling for visibility problems. Hire for judgement problems. If the information was there and nobody acted, no board will save you.

A reasonable sequence

• Fix the board and run it honestly for one quarter
• Give one existing person explicit responsibility for keeping it true
• Count what still goes wrong at the end of the quarter
• If what remains is judgement and negotiation, hire, and hire for that

You will also have a much better job description than the one you would have written today.