Types of PM: Analytical
Mapping different Project Manager's personality traits and their advantages
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
Starting a new series of articles to initiate a discussion of different Project Management profiles, and better understand the strengths and weaknesses of different types of personalities that are around the industry. Hopefully, this series will cover a wide range of personality types and help identify core advantages and improvement points, and if the reader identifies with some of them, it can provide tips for improvement or attention points.
This series will start with the Analytical type, which is in my opinion the most common profile that is drawn to Project Manager jobs and very naturally so. Please note, that these articles will go through some wide generalizations. In some cases, part of these features or critiques can applied better than others. Generalizations are simply an agglomeration of different traits that can or not be, however, each individual is unique.
The Strengths
The analytical profile tends to be very data-oriented and rational in decision-making. No wonder it’s a profile that is drawn to project management tasks. The Analytical Project Manager tends to gather data points and produce KPIs or general indicators to have a quantifiable way of understanding how the project is going and if is on the right track or not.
The Analytical can understand the data and anticipate the construction of data points for being analyzed later during the project execution or retrospectives. These Analytical profiles are the ones annoying the team to make sure their timesheets are submitted on time, with the right periodicity to make sure the data quality is at its maximum, with a level of detail that might scare the most Go-with-the-Flow developer.
Naturally, Efficiency comes in as a second nature. Due to the ongoing data collection, ideas to increase the figures keep popping up and hopefully be shared with the team. Highly mature teams with a long long-lasting reign of an Analytical Project Manager might be like a Swiss Clock that keeps ticking with a high precision level.
The Analytical mind favors multiple feedback loops, with continuous measurements of the team’s performance, contributing to increased efficiency rates and industrialization or process standardization. These profiles are great for established teams and products since they can utilize their skills best for continuous improvement.
The Improvement Points
An analytical mind is like a knife cutting through problems. In regards to People Management, using an analytical mind can bring some challenges that other personality types are easier to manage: Team and Stakeholder Management. For sure those emails and reports will be with the level of detail necessary for decision-making. However, any project, as a human being-oriented endeavor, requires a bit of beer to understand the intricacies of the political context, and the reasons why some decisions were made in a certain fashion. The world is not a mathematical formula, and a lot of details come to light depending on the approach and engaging different project actors.
These minds may need the effort to build a true connection with different stakeholders (team members, providers, sponsors, clients, etc.) which can provide invaluable information or data, which in many cases are not quantifiable, to guarantee the success of the project.
Especially in IT where there is a wide range of personality types in the software development world. Being able to connect with all sorts of personalities can bring the stability the project needs. Remembering the number one cause of a person quitting their job is their direct manager. Analytical minds might struggle with this part of the job the most.
Another struggle that comes directly with seeking all the fine print and indicators, all the data, and the quality of the metrics, is giving too much attention to detail. Nothing wrong with navigating the data to make the right decisions. However, while spending a lot of time on the finer details of the project, one might lose track of the wider picture. Is important to have a clear sight of why a project is being executed and have a grasp of the unspoken effects. Not everything will appear on a spreadsheet.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message on Substack.
Cheers,
Artur