What is a project manager particularly a project manager for a healthcare company and what do they do?
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We start with the premise that most companies (or hospitals) are organized by functions. What I mean is, people that do similar things are grouped together. For example, a hospital may have a department for radiology, for nurses, for residents, for doctors, as well as support functions such as IT, facilities, accounting, etc. each with a department head and a reporting tree under them.
Their day to day tasks can typically be handled within their own department – that’s why the departments are organized that way, to be efficient at the day to day tasks. But occasionally, a more complex task comes along, that requires coordination among multiple departments. And there is no simple way for the multiple departments to coordinate. (By no simple way, I meant, you’d need to go all the way up the report chain until you find a common manager among all affected functions, then have the directions come all the way down from that manager to the people on the floor level that’s actually doing the work — that’s really inefficient.)
That’s where a project manager comes in. The project manager coordinates among all of the functions that are involved to get these “complex tasks” done.
In practice, because project managers are focused on coordinating these cross functional tasks, they are usually better trained to handle the complexities.
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