Regardless of the industry you work in and the level you’ve reached in your career, you’ve likely encountered a project manager or been one yourself. They’re always among us, with to-do lists and timelines to hand, ready to call out whoever is hindering progress for the rest of the team.

The purpose of the role is self-explanatory: project managers are responsible for managing projects. According to the Association for Project Management there are six areas that a project manager “must be competent in managing”. These are: scope, schedule, finance, risk, quality and resources.

This all sounds sensible for any business that wants to boost its bottom line. Yet, it feels like there’s growing scepticism, bordering on contention, about the value that project managers deliver for their employers.

If your social media algorithms tilt towards the corporate humour niche, you’ll know that nobody is given a harder time than project managers. TikTok and Instagram creators who re-enact meetings led by project managers often portray them as doing nothing more than busywork, while achieving none of their required outcomes. To put it bluntly, many people perceive project management as a pointless pursuit that, more than anything else, exists to cause annoyance to colleagues.

Those who don’t work directly with project managers often simply can’t believe project management is a ‘real’ profession, and if you ask people to name a ‘bullshit job’, a descriptor coined by anthropologist David Graeber that’s defined as meaningless jobs that don’t generate any real value, riffs on project managers are the first that come to mind.

But are these fair conclusions or is the criticism of project management unwarranted?

What do project managers actually do? And why do so many people have a problem with them?