I was reading an article today about what contributors thought were the 7 traits of a highly skilled Project Manager. These articles typically touch on a number of areas that are familiar themes such as the Project Manager being very planning and control focused, a great leader of people, able to make decisions and ultimately building a highly effective team that in my mind is the overall driver of success.

The article this morning had a couple of areas I personally disagree with and I was interested if others had an opinion on these topics. The first one I will cover is that the article states that the Project Manager needs to be detailed oriented. I would state one trait of a Project Manager is having enough knowledge on the project in which to be able to identify issues and control them. If a Project Manager becomes too detail oriented they are in danger of getting involved in aspects of the project that will alienate them from the team member and lose focus of the project as a whole. That doesn’t mean that a Project Manager wont spend more time and effort in certain areas that maybe having issues, but will have to ensure that sight is not lost of all the other moving project parts. An example maybe a project that is having to make technical decisions on how the design of the infrastructure is set up and performs and the Project Manager needs to ensure that a decision here doesn’t impact a business requirement.
My attempt to redefine the trait is that a Project Manager needs to know enough in order to spot issues to enable them to control a project, but not too much as to ‘step on the toes’ of the person on the team responsible for the task – thoughts?

Final point on this is that the trait was raised by a Product Manager for a web tool development company. Maybe the detail oriented approach is more suited to a Product Manager as opposed to a Project Manager??