I’ll not be mistaken if I say that first of all Project Manager should have all characteristics peculiar to a Leader. There are a lot of investigations devoted to signatures of a manager, but I’d like to stop on some specific qualities of them which are necessary due to the peculiarities of project activity. I’d like to consider such peculiarities, according to the PMBOK, as impermanence and unique character of the projects.

• In view of temporal character of a project, Project Manager should be very mobile. In addition, he shouldn’t cling to his place at a project and be ready to be “out of work” at least until the start of a new project. On the other hand, Project Manager should be passionate about his project activities and reaching project goals.
• The unique character of a project requires from the person to be a master of many disciplines, in contrast to managers of functional organizations who can be a specialist of the one and only sphere of knowledge.

As particular project demands various knowledge and skills there is a question “How deep and wide should be education and experience of a project manager?” Obviously, for difficult projects the demands are rather high and diverse and one person can’t be a professional in all the spheres. The solution is to form a project team which includes professionals of varied branches of knowledge. This team, apart from doing project activity, should execute the function of “incubator”, selecting future leaders and project managers.

Consequently, we should take into account one more specific feature of project activity – team work. A project is implemented by a temporary team of co-workers and a manager should be effective in managing such a temporal formation. This is a one more essential difference between project manager and functional manager.

With a glance to all the peculiarities of project realization, a Project Manager has to:

 Solve problems which can’t be redirected to other specialists;
 Take into account multitude factors with difficult interrelationship, evaluate compatibility, consistency of separate decisions, regulate connections between project goals and methods of reaching them;
 Correct definite sub goals and norms for a limited period, suggesting scenarios of possible development directions and recommendations for other levels of management;
 Rebuild connections between representatives of upper management, middle managers and specialist of various departments who take part in realization of different stages of a project;
 Come to mutual agreement with all the sides interested in a project;
 Take on responsibilities, make non-trivial decisions, and honorably bear a failure if it happens;
 Do a lot of other things.