According to the analysis of the modern market, our world has many popular, highly paid and prestigious professions, among which it is a project manager. Nevertheless, we can try to understand the terminology to better understand this kind of activity. What is a «project»? This business term came from the sphere of engineering activity. There, it meant a set of models and descriptions, characteristics and properties (like specifications) that specialists can use to create a system that has functions that lead to predicted results». In simple terms, in business, a project is a strategy to achieve the investor’s set of resources.

Time acceleration

The history of the Middle Ages tells us that many centuries of war were fought with primitive cannons, which the soldiers loaded with powder and shot from the barrel. It took people a couple of decades to build an automatic rifle. In the twenty-first century, rapid progress has several conditions, among which are the acceleration of projects, the reduction of periods between the emergence of creative design and the market realisation of the produced product.

Acceleration of realisation of commercial projects is the result of active and wide introduction of scientific project management. There is also a term such as the scientific organisation of labour, which is responsible for increasing the productivity of employees. Also, there is project management too, which is responsible for shortening the cycle of creating a finished product from scratch.

The scientific nature of modern project management lies in the fact that the project manager does not come up with a new plan every time from his or her fantasies, but uses ready-made schemes or templates (programmers and developers call them as frameworks). They were designed for different types of projects to optimise the project implementation process and reduce the cost of product creation in advance.

Thus, the project manager is a living catalyst in the new product development industry because he or she greatly speeds up the process of product entry into the global market, and also increases the competitiveness of manufacturers and suppliers, saves investors money and increases profits. This is the reason why employers pay these professionals such large salaries and appreciate them. If we use figurative terminology, a project manager is a catalyst for technical and commercial progress.

Translation difficulties

The narrow specialisation and global division of labour have become a major factor in the historical efficiency of modern economies and industries. The modern factory-manufacturer of cars is engaged only in the assembly, but its component parts are manufactured on the territory of hundreds and even thousands of factories, which are located in different countries of the world. Their location depends on the low cost of labour and the profitability of logistics operations.

Experts use very specific terminology. For example, entrepreneurs speak the language of commerce, and investors think in financial language. Firms are constantly faced with the fact that customers are unable to explain clearly what they have to do during their business hours. Then, experts believe that the problem is the negligent attitude of the customer, who tries to get rid of “superfluous” work responsibilities and give them to another specialist.

Moreover, this misunderstanding leads to the fact that the developer creates a very high-quality product, but not the one that the customer expected to receive. As a result, he or she did the work in vain, and the problem with a situation like this is the limitations of verbal communication. The language people speak is very imperfect. Moreover, there is no understanding in any linguistic sense, as each individual implies his own unique meaning when he utters a word, and his listener interprets his speech in the way he is able to do so.

That is why we can say with confidence that the project manager is primarily a translator from the client’s language to the terminology of direct performers. There are many commands of different specialisations in product development. So, the project manager should be a «polyglot» in this field and his or her main skill set is communication with the programmer, designer, engineer or even turner, which is aimed at explaining labour tasks.