IME the PM is the least knowledgeable person on the team. Glorified admin asst is right, hopefully with better people skills. I have no idea how well they are paid in my company but it is probably too much.
“Do you have an ETA on that?”
“What additional resources do you need to accomplish that?”
“So what are your next action steps?”
I swear, as an SME, I could speak complete gibberish and they’d respond the exact same way.
And while you were doing the former, the latter didn’t become blindingly obvious?
You don’t strike me as being naive. I bet it did and the PMP is just for mo’ money. 
To borrow from Tennyson:
We (pm’s) are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
Knowing when to do which, and with whom, is the mark of a great PM.
A project manager shouldn’t need to be knowledgeable about the detail of what is being done. Project management is, or should be, an abstract process.
In my experience, project managers who get their hand too dirty with detail are the ones who have not made provision for the transition into normal operation when the project is complete.
A PM managing IT projects should be able to switch to managing any other kind of project with very little re-skilling, or else what they are doing is not project management at all.
At my job, the PM is still just a role senior engineers take in a project. They’re often part of the project team, and help develop the design, work with the customer on their expectations, assign work to other team members, and take care of businessy stuff like making sure the invoices are correct before they’re sent out.
We’ve recently started hiring PMPs and separating “Project Manager” out as its own job title for engineers who want to focus on that role, or for people without engineering experience hired to be dedicated PMs.
A project manager who isn’t an engineer makes no sense to me in the context of my job. I understand a lot of engineers would rather not take on that role, so they have to hire dedicated PMs, but without technical experience it would seem the best they can do is shield engineers from some unnecessary paperwork. At worst they just make the bureaucracy unbearable.
PMP is an “all gods children” certification. The PGMP is much more difficult to obtain and leads to more interesting opportunities.
The one essential function of a project manager is to lead the team to victory in Buzzword Bingo.
I got a PMP on my own dime and for the defense industry I found it did make a difference, if only because the Government sometimes asks for people who have that credential when you are bid on a project. I didn’t need this credential, and indeed, only got it because I saw people who I knew to be complete idiots getting it and advancing, particularly when it came time to switch jobs.
I can’t speak for other industries, but in mine, even with the right connections, you still have to pass the gatekeeper HR people who themselves don’t know anything about the technology or even the company in some cases. That said, if I have degree X and you have degree X, but I also have a PMP, then my resume gets weighted hire than yours in the pile, and that’s all I really wanted. I learned this way too late in my career in terms of my MBA, which I got from a top 20 business school. That said, I was getting beaten out by other MBAs who went to bar, grill, and business schools because they wanted less money. From the standpoint of the high school graduate HR person doing the searches, she doesn’t know if an MBA from Harvard is any better than one from University of Phoenix. All she knows is one guy wants $150,000 and the other wants $80,000 and they both have the same letters after their name. The PMP is extra letters and carries some cache, so while I agree that the project management part is bullshit, it is worth the money. At the time I added the PMP (and Lean Six Sigma Green Belt) to my LinkedIn profile, I saw the number of views of my profile triple versus ‘just’ having an MBA from a great school and excellent work experience.
In the project I mentioned which was about as state-of-the-art as you are ever likely to see, it would have made no sense for the PMs to be engineers. I guess engineers could go into project management, but they would have to leave their technical skills behind. The PM can tell the impact of decisions, but not make them or even recommend them.
I see the PM as kind of like a passenger in a car. He can tell how long it will take to get to a destination giving the speed the driver is going, he can tell when you need more gas, and he can point out that the cars is heading right into a tree. But the driver (the functional manager) has to brake or steer around it.
The examples with PM software are all well constrained and well understood projects, like putting on a play. When you know your destination it is easy to predict when you will get there. The projects I’ve been on have been more like finding a three story house with purple trim in the entire state of California, with minimal clues. Hard to predict when you will be done with that one.
PM certainly can be a glorified babysitting job, my company has it’s fair share of those. Part of my job is project management, but it’s defined as the boss saying “Doc, we got a problem. Fix it”. I then define the issue, determine the stakeholders, organize and facilitate meetings, set expecations, translate between IT and operations, identify and scope solutions, create cost benefit analysis, negotiate timelines, negotiate impasses, enforce deadlines and deliver the solution on time and on budget. Oh, and create/maintain the project documentation.
That takes a little skill and knowledge, if I do say so myself. 
All this while seeing patients and running a medical practice??
How does you do it, Doc?
What is PGMP?
I have been a PM for 15+ years, and a PMP for most of those. I agree with a lot of the comments here, and a lot really does depend on how the organization understands the role of a PM, and what it expects of them.
Some projects I have been on have very low expectations of the PM - like that guy from Office Space - “my job is to take the specs from the customer and give it to the engineers!”. Other times I am called-on to assess if a big, expensive, complex project will come in under budget or not. Mainly, I am tasked with ensuring people are doing what they agreed to do, removing obstacles, escalating emerging risks, and communicating up and down the food chain.
One skill that is required to be a PM is communications - the job is mostly about that (not tools). If you see a PM with a checklist, you are in trouble already - that is what some of the posters here have experienced - really just a glorified project administrator. Having knowledge of what is going on technically, or of the product, is really helpful - but dropping an IT PM into a business area and telling them to run a business process change project can be a disaster, and vice-versa.
The project manager should not be on the critical path of a project - the PM should not be “doing” anything, other than ensuring other are doing what is expected. One mistake some organizations make is “promoting” a good engineer or subject matter expert to “Project Manager”. The person may be a genius with code, but may suck at working with people.
As for getting the PMP certification, it does help get gigs, if nothing else. I have worked with many PMs both in IT and business-driven environments - they run the gamut from certified PMPs who are terrible, to experienced PMs without certification who are wonderful. Having the PMP does not make you “good”.
They did a study at a large company I worked at. Projects run by PMPs were the worst; more behind schedule, more over budget; etc.
To be fair though they didn’t take it to the next step to see if they were only assigning PMPs to the largest, most complex projects with higher likelihood of failure but I can tell you that certain people used the results to only get PMs w/o PMP certification.
My company just started having a PM office four years ago, and quite frankly, I find that they have made a great deal of positive difference. They free the technical personnel from a lot of the “process” paperwork and help keep members of different departments with different direct-report managers who are on the same project well-coordinated.
LOL. That’s logical. I recall a similar study somewhere a few years ago about Six Sigma; companies who implemented it - their stock’s performance was worse than those that didn’t.
Great and informative thread; it has me wondering what my job really is.
Program Management Professional. Another certification offered by PMI.
What a great scam they have going. I hate it that I didn’t think of it first.
I’m thinking of starting my own, however. I’m going to call it SMEI: Subject Matter Expert Insitute. It’s main focus will be to train people to “Know what the fuck you are talking about before you open your mouth, dumbass.”
I’m working on a shorter, more catchy slogan.
Tech skills aren’t what makes an engineer, though. They’re what makes the adjective in front of “engineer”, but as my brother said when I showed him and ad asking for “Organizational Engineers” (at a time when that degree had just started its first college year): “uh? But… organize is what we engineers DO!”
I keep having people ask me whether I wouldn’t rather work in “my field”, when I happen to be an engineer who’s good at process improvement stuff and an ERP implementation is a damn big process improvement project. It is exactly my field - but the engineer parts of it, not the chemical ones.