How to manage the project without project manager?

There are few points forced to manage the project without Project Manager:
- Project is small in terms of quantity of work and number of people to carry out that work
- The complexity and risk is low
- The sponsor feels that they do more on technical jobs or R&D or performing case study, so that the need of the project management is minimal (this point is opposite to the above points as the technical jobs, R&D and case study have more uncertainties and challenges)
- No budget to cover the cost of Project Management indeed Project Manager

On the value of Project Management trying to manage a project without project management is like trying to play a football game without a game plan. Any project requires the leadership and organizational skills of a Project Manager to even get off the ground. 

The Project Manager identifies a mission for the team as well as clearly settled objectives, establishes short, medium, and long term goals, and brings together the skills and resources of the team to accomplish these goals. 

Even though if we are not directly stating that there is no project manager exists in the project, there might be an indirect role played by the project sponsor or developer or any other team member.

In this case the team member must be matured enough to ensure that things are going as per requirement. In fact they should meet every day and review the progress mutually. 

To get benefit of the success of the project (indeed to get money from the sponsor) the vendor can ask over the Program Manager or PMO or Project Coordinator to take care of project management activities or throw project management tasks to the team, eventually, a leader will emerge, likely after a lot of chaos and wasted time and effort, but one will emerge.

What are the challenges faced by the team without project manager:

- The project team will face more conflicts about the project that they couldn’t work together. They make decisions that undercut each other and in the end they couldn’t deliver anything at all.
- The project team will face more issues regarding the coordinating tasks like arranging the meeting, following with testing team, moving the deliverables to live and others
- The team will be focusing on the tasks for that they paid for; there will be no one to manage the stakeholder’s expectations
- The team mostly waiting for someone to make the decision, this leads no tracking of the issues related to scope, schedule and cost
- Ego is every ones property, without project manager facilitation the project suffers lot due to ego clashes
- Poor in following organization mandated process; and there is no chance for process improvement
- The Sponsor or the Vendor Organization will not get the right status/metrics at right time
- Project affected due to Scope Creep/Gold Plating
- There are no guarantee that the risks are managed

To conclude I never experienced the project without project manager. I expect valuable ideas and suggestions from fellow project managers.