project managers?
I’ve been a project manager. I still manage translation projects quite often. And I manage other project managers. Project Management, in a translation agency or otherwise, is a tough job if done correctly. But it’s not a profession in the same way being a translator is.
Provocative, right? (Oddly, I don’t fear the kind of backlash Sarah Palin got from Community Organizers.) No slight to project managers. A good one (and I’ve known several) is the very picture of knowledge, efficiency, hard work, patience, charm, clear communication, etc. And these skills can take years to acquire. Many project managers, unfortunately, burn out too soon owing to pressures from above to move a lot of work and the long hours required to do so.
The most elemental job of a translation project manager is to find out what the client requires and communicate this to the translator and editor. The ideal project manager guides the unfamiliar client through the world of professional translation and instructs the translator unfamiliar with the needs of this specific client.
The unskilled project manager on the other hand doesn’t know enough to assess what the client wants or really understand what a translator does. Even with proper training, it can be an uphill battle to disabuse clients of the notion that we spend our days feeding documents into a translation machine, just as it’s hard to convince some translators that project managers have the sliqhtest idea of what translation involves.
Do we always need them?
No. Not always. Project Managers are crucial to the translation agency. Yet, not all clients need educating. Not all translators need guiding. Not all projects require multiple iterations flowing from project manager, translator, editor, proofreader and back again. At agencies we can forget that clients might be adept at finding — by internet — their own translators; and we forget too that many translators serve clients directly. This direct service, as in many industries, is only growing with the internet.
So where am I going with this?
(I asked myself that half-way through this post.) Anyway, with the internet, the ground has been shifting underneath the traditional service model for a few years. Not that Google’s proposed “Translation Center” will make the translation agency dissappear overnight; it sounds like a hit-or-miss operation for both clients and translators. Yet agencies must evolve to compete. For we must acknowledge that on many jobs, the agency’s most important role is to choose the right translator for the project. It seems to me then that the obvious next step for the agency would be to improve upon and refine Google’s approach by not only putting the client in direct contact with the translator, but by offering clients access to a database of reliable, pre-vetted and project-specific translators. Translation agency of the future? Or the end of the translation agency?
6 responses so far ↓
1 PM Hut // Jan 13, 2009 at 6:15 am
I think a lot of people will disagree with you on Project Management not being a profession, some will agree.
I have published an article a while ago, The Profession of Project Management that deals with this particular subject.
2 Glenn // Jan 13, 2009 at 7:36 am
Dear PM Hut,
Thank you for reading. I appreciate your sharing the article, and I will read it. This is one claim I would not mind being proved wrong about, because it takes training and years of experience to be a good project manager. In my industry, however, I have yet to meet a project manager who views it as a profession or aspires to remain in the position for their career. Could this be particular to the translation industry?
Glenn
3 Corinne McKay // Jan 13, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Great post, Glenn! There are some days when I am *so* grateful for the good project managers I work with, and I am really glad to have them as a go-between from me to a difficult or poorly-informed client so that I can spend my time translating. Other days, it feels like a mediocre PM is merely another layer in the communication process when I have a question that the client could answer in 30 seconds. I work with a couple of agencies that have extremely professional PMs who have been there for years, and it’s a night-and-day difference from the places where everyone seems to last 6 months on the job.
4 PM Hut // Jan 14, 2009 at 6:10 am
Glenn,
I’m afraid this applies across the board, there aren’t a lot of Project Managers out there who are passionate about their work, and there are lots of Project Managers that are there by accident, or as a logical and temporary advance in their career.
Whether Project Management is a profession or not is still very debatable, and the way I see it, it will remain debatable for the foreseeable future.
5 Glenn // Jan 14, 2009 at 11:32 am
@ Corinne, thanks for your comment. Although I’ve worked at only a couple agencies before having my own, what you say seems to be my sense too. Some agencies realize that the role of project manager is crucial to their success and they should be given all the training, support and respect possible. Other agencies see PMs as grunt workers, push them to the breaking point and like to replace them with someone cheaper.
I feel like when I began a little over a decade ago, translation pricing made it possible to encourage professionalism in this field; but with the fierce competition in the industry since then, the cheaper the PM the better.
@ PM Hut, it looks like you’re working on changing the view of the profession. A worthwhile struggle.
As I mention to Corinne, I think price pressures have a lot to do with it. PMs make up the majority of the staff in many translation agencies, so getting cheaper ones, or reducing their number and loading more work upon each seems completely logical among agency owners.
Having perused your terrific site, one idea that popped out is that PMs should not be doing the work of the project, but managing it, which is a full time job in itself (I fully agree). This is not the case at many agencies I’ve come across.
I plan to read more. Thanks again for stopping by. - Glenn
6 A few additions to the blogroll // Feb 1, 2009 at 5:40 am
[...] Hut: The Project Management Hut is a site I learned about after my recent post, What’s the deal with Project Managers? PM Hut takes the role of the project manager very seriously and, although it doesn’t seem to [...]
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