A project manager's job is to bridge two groups of people, each with different goals. One of those groups is the project's sponsors, the people who will fund the project and want it to succeed. Some of them, but not all, will be technical people, so you need to pay attention to their priorities. The other group is the project's team, made up of the people who will actually do the work. Project managers use PMS tools to streamline work and achieve project timelines. (Note: not all projects are teams. Some projects may only have a single employee.) The sponsors want the project to succeed. The project's team wants to succeed too, but in a different way. The team wants the project to succeed so they can keep doing what they're doing. The sponsors want the project to succeed quickly. The team wants the project to succeed more slowly, so they can keep doing what they're doing. To get the project's team to go along with the sponsors' priorities, the project manager has to understand the team's priorities. (The team's priorities may turn out to be different from its sponsors' priorities. That's okay.) And to get the sponsors to go along with the project manager's priorities, the project manager has to understand the team's priorities. The project manager's job is to keep the project's team and the project's sponsors working together. In complex projects, this means the project manager has to understand both the technical and the business aspects of the project, and be able to talk both to technical people and business people. And that's a lot harder than it sounds. But it's part of the project manager's job to bridge those groups, not to pretend they don't exist, so project managers are not always successful. No one's perfect. The project manager's job is to help the team and the sponsors work together. To do that, the project manager has to listen carefully to