Top 13 project management skills
Here is my short list of 13 must-have skills for project managers, and some books that will help you get there.
1. Communication skills
Did you know that 90 percent of a project manager’s time is spent communicating? It’s essential that project managers can effectively convey vision, ideas, goals, and issues—as well as produce reports and presentations, among other skills.
“Project managers must speak the same language as their clients,” as well as their team members, says Mike Mills, project manager at Sagefrog Marketing Group, a B2B marketing agency. “It’s somewhat of a cliché, but this phrase really does describe one of the most important skills that can make or break client relationships. Project managers are the sole translators, sharing information, updates and next steps from client to internal team and back again.”
“Communication skills are the core part of a project manager’s skill set,” says Danielyan. A project manager who is “a good communicator can resolve or prevent almost any issue by being clear [and] encouraging an unhindered flow of information, which means [getting] the right information to the right person through the right channel exactly when it is needed.”
Related post: CommunicationSkills365.info/free-ebook-36-secrets-to-become-a-super-communicator
2. Planning Skills
Project scheduling is a core project management skill, but one that surprisingly, many managers do not pay much attention to, says Elizabeth Harrin of Project Management Perspectives. But really, what is a project manager without a plan? Our ability to organize tasks in the right order, to hit the right outcome at the right time is a major part of our jobs as project manager, isn’t it? It is absolutely critical that as project managers, we give scheduling the serious attention it deserves, and along with it, monitoring progress as the project moves forward and making tweaks to ensure that everything stays on track.
Proper planning means everything from meta to micro. There’s the large scale obvious planning we need to get right to create great meeting plans, statements of work, estimates, timelines, resource plans and briefs, to the more mundane – planning out your day, who you’re going to talk to first, and how you are going to make time to keep your status documents up to date. Planning is all about finding ways to do all that you need to do as efficiently as possible.
The extent to which you’re able to effectively plan will directly impact the project’s ability to be successful. No matter how good you are at executing, without being able to properly plan a project, the project won’t succeed.
The project management planning skill to master is planning to the extent that you’re always ten steps ahead and always know ‘what’s next’. That means not only for success but for the disasters too. As a skilled project manager, you’ve always got a plan up your sleeve.
3. Cost Control
Budget management is bizarrely one of my favourite topics. I am not a natural maths whizz but I do like a well put together spreadsheet. If I understand the numbers and create my own tracking mechanism I can tell you to the penny how much my project is spending.
Cost management is a critical topic for project managers. Those without this skill will be at a disadvantage because budgets are tight. You need to show that you can deliver your project within the cost constraints and by managing the project finances intelligently.
4. Risk Management
The more mature project management gets as a profession, the more we find ourselves doing projects that are unique. The more ‘routine’ the project, the more it is likely to get outsourced or given to a functional manager who shows an aptitude for getting things done. Project managers will work on the more complex, transformative, unique endeavours that require decent risk management.
Being able to control risk (as far as you can) is a sign that you are on top of your project. Project sponsors hate surprises and good risk management is one way that you can manage that.
5. Contract Management
Part of managing your project involves managing suppliers. The vast majority of projects will have an element of supply, whether that is something as simple as the outside caterers who bring in cakes for your launch event or a full-on off-shoring system development firm.
Contract management is about being able to actively manage those procurements. Previously many project managers have been able to rely on their Finance departments to get this sort of work done (and Legal teams for managing the terms of the deal). Today, with everyone under pressure to do more with less, it’s falling to project managers to pick up the slack when it comes to procurement.
6. Time Management
As project managers, a huge part of our job is determining and communicating how other people will spend their time. But it’s equally important to be aware of how we are managing our own time. Steven Covey’s quote, “The enemy of the best is the good,” applies really well when it comes to the project manager’s management of time (theirs and their team’s). There are a million and one good things you could be doing, but a good project manager recognizes that only a few things fall into the category of “best” and these few things are what need to come first each day. Knowing when to say “No” is a critical project management skill.
The problem is that important tasks usually get trumped by urgent tasks. So if you’ve got a limited amount of time in your day, how can you make sure you set aside time for important tasks so you don’t get totally stressed out?
It’s all about nailing the difference between urgent and important and Eisenhower’s famous prioritization matrix mapping. As Eisenhowever pointed out, “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”
Meetings are some of the biggest thieves of time. Between meetings that (unjustifiably) overrun their allocated time to those that are totally unnecessary, we have learnt over the years to save valuable time by engaging critical thinking skills that help us weigh what is important and what is not, and so have developed the ability to know when not to have a meeting or to simply pull the plug on a meeting that’s gone off the rails. This is a valuable aspect of time management and a critical skill for project management that every good project manager must develop. A good strategy that works really well in managing meeting time it to always have an agenda and stick to it.
Successful project managers also respect their teammates’ time, so being able to read the body language of people in the room is also critical to ensuring that you’re staying on course. Lastly, look for opportunities to delegate responsibilities, multi-task, or rearrange your schedule as necessary.
The project management time-management skill to master is doing the right thing. If you can make sure you don’t get caught up in wild goose chases on your projects and can stick to focussing the best part of your time on the important things everyone will win.
Related post: timemanagement247.info/free-ebook-42-time-management-tips-to-hack-productivity
7. Risk Management
Project managers are always an easy target when projects don’t go to plan. Regardless of the circumstances, everyone wonders whether the project manager could have foreseen and prevented the risk before it became an issue.
Project sponsors hate surprises and good risk management is one way of avoiding surprises, especially the nasty ones. Risks are often not urgent which means many project managers fail to consider risks as seriously as they should. You can stay on top of your project by controlling risk, and actively mitigating against it as far as you can.
The skill for effective risk management is really experience – it’s knowing what could go wrong. And having the humility to ask your team too. You obviously first need to identify risk and the earlier you do that, the better your chances of avoiding the risk occurrence.
It doesn’t end there, however. Risk identification must be followed by a risk plan for what to do about them. This involves assigning a probability, a cost, an owner and using mitigation strategies that are suitable for the risk and the appetite for the client for things going wrong. These action plans need to be incorporated into your main plan and tracked as well.
Effectively managing that risk has massive benefits. Your clients are going to be happier because you are able to improve delivery for your clients and be more efficient with your clients’ resources to provide them with better value for money. But it’s not all about them – you get get the added benefit of finding yourself spending less time juggling hot potatoes and unnecessarily firefighting unwelcome surprises.
The project management risk management skill to master is the ability to identify risks well before they become issues, and come up with effective mitigation plans so that the risk of them ever becoming issues is nullified.
8. Negotiation Skills
Project management is somewhat like politics; it often brings together a disparate group of people, often with competing interests, and our job is to get these different interests on the same page, so that we can accomplish project goals. In other words, a good project manager must be an excellent negotiator.
“Negotiating the use of resources, budgets, schedules, scope creep, and a variety of other compromises that are unavoidable” for a project manager says Cesar Abeid, and “[k]nowing how to negotiate well so that all parties are satisfied is a key skill for the successful project manager.”
As project managers we can find ourselves negotiating with just about everyone, every day. Whether we’re negotiating for resource from our fellow project managers, negotiating for support from senior management, negotiating with 3rd party suppliers or with clients – there are always disparate interests that we need to try and align. The key to successfully negotiating is to ‘win’ without burning any bridges. After all, unlike sales negotiations, we aren’t usually lucky enough to just be able to walk away from a deal if the terms aren’t right. We have to find a middle ground.
Our negotiation skills require that we invest time to understand relationships and stakeholders’ interests, so that we can clearly identify what is needed to move our projects forward. Failure to do this puts us at risk of ignoring critical relationships, which will, unfortunately lead to failure.
Discussions about budgets, resource allocation, and timelines can become adversarial and counterproductive if not handled tactfully. Successful project managers know how to find compromises where possible and how to hold a firm line without damaging their workplace relationships.
The key project management negotiation skill to master is finding that middle ground – working out compromises so everyone that matters feels like they’ve won!
9. Budget management:
In order to keep a project on track, a project manager must have a solid grasp of basic accounting principles and must maintain a constant awareness of the project’s budgetary performance. Identifying variances or discrepancies as soon as they arise will help you avoid unpleasant surprises down the road.
10. Scope management:
Project managers must have a thorough understanding of what is and is not in scope at the beginning of every project. When a project’s scope needs to change, be sure to document the change appropriately, create a clear audit trail and communicate the impact on budgets and timelines to all stakeholders.
11. Conflict resolution:
The bigger the project and the higher the stakes, the more likely it is that conflicts will arise. Whether the disagreement is between members of the same team, between a vendor and a customer, or between any other groups of stakeholders, a good project manager knows how to defuse tension and find a path forward. Setting expectations and providing transparency throughout the project lifecycle can go far in minimizing conflicts and keeping everything on track.
12. Task Management
This is another bread and butter task for project managers. You should be able to create a task list, delegate work to others and keep on top of progress. I found this was the easiest part of project management when I started because I was naturally a list-maker. If it doesn’t come easy to you you’ll have to develop strategies to ensure you are always on top of your To Do list.
When you have cracked managing your own work you can help others manage theirs. This is the best way in my experience to make sure that projects come in on time and others take responsibility for their deliverables.
13. Quality Management
Quality management ensures that you deliver a product that is fit for purpose. What project sponsor doesn’t want that? Unfortunately project managers often don’t spend enough time on the quality angle of their projects – it’s one of those processes and set of tasks that are overlooked as an administrative overhead.
If you are a quality expert, then good for you. But if you aren’t, seriously consider upping this on the priority list for 2015. The better the quality of your deliverables, the better value you are offering stakeholders and the more satisfied they will be.
Related materials:
+ ProjectManager88.info/free-ebook-52-secrets-to-be-professional-project-manager
+ ProjectManager88.info/free-257-project-management-templates
+ ProjectManager88.info/free-ebook-62-tips-to-improve-project-effectiveness
Did you know that 90 percent of a project manager’s time is spent communicating? It’s essential that project managers can effectively convey vision, ideas, goals, and issues—as well as produce reports and presentations, among other skills.
“Project managers must speak the same language as their clients,” as well as their team members, says Mike Mills, project manager at Sagefrog Marketing Group, a B2B marketing agency. “It’s somewhat of a cliché, but this phrase really does describe one of the most important skills that can make or break client relationships. Project managers are the sole translators, sharing information, updates and next steps from client to internal team and back again.”
“Communication skills are the core part of a project manager’s skill set,” says Danielyan. A project manager who is “a good communicator can resolve or prevent almost any issue by being clear [and] encouraging an unhindered flow of information, which means [getting] the right information to the right person through the right channel exactly when it is needed.”
Related post: CommunicationSkills365.info/free-ebook-36-secrets-to-become-a-super-communicator
2. Planning Skills
Project scheduling is a core project management skill, but one that surprisingly, many managers do not pay much attention to, says Elizabeth Harrin of Project Management Perspectives. But really, what is a project manager without a plan? Our ability to organize tasks in the right order, to hit the right outcome at the right time is a major part of our jobs as project manager, isn’t it? It is absolutely critical that as project managers, we give scheduling the serious attention it deserves, and along with it, monitoring progress as the project moves forward and making tweaks to ensure that everything stays on track.
Proper planning means everything from meta to micro. There’s the large scale obvious planning we need to get right to create great meeting plans, statements of work, estimates, timelines, resource plans and briefs, to the more mundane – planning out your day, who you’re going to talk to first, and how you are going to make time to keep your status documents up to date. Planning is all about finding ways to do all that you need to do as efficiently as possible.
The extent to which you’re able to effectively plan will directly impact the project’s ability to be successful. No matter how good you are at executing, without being able to properly plan a project, the project won’t succeed.
The project management planning skill to master is planning to the extent that you’re always ten steps ahead and always know ‘what’s next’. That means not only for success but for the disasters too. As a skilled project manager, you’ve always got a plan up your sleeve.
3. Cost Control
Budget management is bizarrely one of my favourite topics. I am not a natural maths whizz but I do like a well put together spreadsheet. If I understand the numbers and create my own tracking mechanism I can tell you to the penny how much my project is spending.
Cost management is a critical topic for project managers. Those without this skill will be at a disadvantage because budgets are tight. You need to show that you can deliver your project within the cost constraints and by managing the project finances intelligently.
4. Risk Management
The more mature project management gets as a profession, the more we find ourselves doing projects that are unique. The more ‘routine’ the project, the more it is likely to get outsourced or given to a functional manager who shows an aptitude for getting things done. Project managers will work on the more complex, transformative, unique endeavours that require decent risk management.
Being able to control risk (as far as you can) is a sign that you are on top of your project. Project sponsors hate surprises and good risk management is one way that you can manage that.
5. Contract Management
Part of managing your project involves managing suppliers. The vast majority of projects will have an element of supply, whether that is something as simple as the outside caterers who bring in cakes for your launch event or a full-on off-shoring system development firm.
Contract management is about being able to actively manage those procurements. Previously many project managers have been able to rely on their Finance departments to get this sort of work done (and Legal teams for managing the terms of the deal). Today, with everyone under pressure to do more with less, it’s falling to project managers to pick up the slack when it comes to procurement.
6. Time Management
As project managers, a huge part of our job is determining and communicating how other people will spend their time. But it’s equally important to be aware of how we are managing our own time. Steven Covey’s quote, “The enemy of the best is the good,” applies really well when it comes to the project manager’s management of time (theirs and their team’s). There are a million and one good things you could be doing, but a good project manager recognizes that only a few things fall into the category of “best” and these few things are what need to come first each day. Knowing when to say “No” is a critical project management skill.
The problem is that important tasks usually get trumped by urgent tasks. So if you’ve got a limited amount of time in your day, how can you make sure you set aside time for important tasks so you don’t get totally stressed out?
It’s all about nailing the difference between urgent and important and Eisenhower’s famous prioritization matrix mapping. As Eisenhowever pointed out, “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”
Meetings are some of the biggest thieves of time. Between meetings that (unjustifiably) overrun their allocated time to those that are totally unnecessary, we have learnt over the years to save valuable time by engaging critical thinking skills that help us weigh what is important and what is not, and so have developed the ability to know when not to have a meeting or to simply pull the plug on a meeting that’s gone off the rails. This is a valuable aspect of time management and a critical skill for project management that every good project manager must develop. A good strategy that works really well in managing meeting time it to always have an agenda and stick to it.
Successful project managers also respect their teammates’ time, so being able to read the body language of people in the room is also critical to ensuring that you’re staying on course. Lastly, look for opportunities to delegate responsibilities, multi-task, or rearrange your schedule as necessary.
The project management time-management skill to master is doing the right thing. If you can make sure you don’t get caught up in wild goose chases on your projects and can stick to focussing the best part of your time on the important things everyone will win.
Related post: timemanagement247.info/free-ebook-42-time-management-tips-to-hack-productivity
7. Risk Management
Project managers are always an easy target when projects don’t go to plan. Regardless of the circumstances, everyone wonders whether the project manager could have foreseen and prevented the risk before it became an issue.
Project sponsors hate surprises and good risk management is one way of avoiding surprises, especially the nasty ones. Risks are often not urgent which means many project managers fail to consider risks as seriously as they should. You can stay on top of your project by controlling risk, and actively mitigating against it as far as you can.
The skill for effective risk management is really experience – it’s knowing what could go wrong. And having the humility to ask your team too. You obviously first need to identify risk and the earlier you do that, the better your chances of avoiding the risk occurrence.
It doesn’t end there, however. Risk identification must be followed by a risk plan for what to do about them. This involves assigning a probability, a cost, an owner and using mitigation strategies that are suitable for the risk and the appetite for the client for things going wrong. These action plans need to be incorporated into your main plan and tracked as well.
Effectively managing that risk has massive benefits. Your clients are going to be happier because you are able to improve delivery for your clients and be more efficient with your clients’ resources to provide them with better value for money. But it’s not all about them – you get get the added benefit of finding yourself spending less time juggling hot potatoes and unnecessarily firefighting unwelcome surprises.
The project management risk management skill to master is the ability to identify risks well before they become issues, and come up with effective mitigation plans so that the risk of them ever becoming issues is nullified.
8. Negotiation Skills
Project management is somewhat like politics; it often brings together a disparate group of people, often with competing interests, and our job is to get these different interests on the same page, so that we can accomplish project goals. In other words, a good project manager must be an excellent negotiator.
“Negotiating the use of resources, budgets, schedules, scope creep, and a variety of other compromises that are unavoidable” for a project manager says Cesar Abeid, and “[k]nowing how to negotiate well so that all parties are satisfied is a key skill for the successful project manager.”
As project managers we can find ourselves negotiating with just about everyone, every day. Whether we’re negotiating for resource from our fellow project managers, negotiating for support from senior management, negotiating with 3rd party suppliers or with clients – there are always disparate interests that we need to try and align. The key to successfully negotiating is to ‘win’ without burning any bridges. After all, unlike sales negotiations, we aren’t usually lucky enough to just be able to walk away from a deal if the terms aren’t right. We have to find a middle ground.
Our negotiation skills require that we invest time to understand relationships and stakeholders’ interests, so that we can clearly identify what is needed to move our projects forward. Failure to do this puts us at risk of ignoring critical relationships, which will, unfortunately lead to failure.
Discussions about budgets, resource allocation, and timelines can become adversarial and counterproductive if not handled tactfully. Successful project managers know how to find compromises where possible and how to hold a firm line without damaging their workplace relationships.
The key project management negotiation skill to master is finding that middle ground – working out compromises so everyone that matters feels like they’ve won!
9. Budget management:
In order to keep a project on track, a project manager must have a solid grasp of basic accounting principles and must maintain a constant awareness of the project’s budgetary performance. Identifying variances or discrepancies as soon as they arise will help you avoid unpleasant surprises down the road.
10. Scope management:
Project managers must have a thorough understanding of what is and is not in scope at the beginning of every project. When a project’s scope needs to change, be sure to document the change appropriately, create a clear audit trail and communicate the impact on budgets and timelines to all stakeholders.
11. Conflict resolution:
The bigger the project and the higher the stakes, the more likely it is that conflicts will arise. Whether the disagreement is between members of the same team, between a vendor and a customer, or between any other groups of stakeholders, a good project manager knows how to defuse tension and find a path forward. Setting expectations and providing transparency throughout the project lifecycle can go far in minimizing conflicts and keeping everything on track.
12. Task Management
This is another bread and butter task for project managers. You should be able to create a task list, delegate work to others and keep on top of progress. I found this was the easiest part of project management when I started because I was naturally a list-maker. If it doesn’t come easy to you you’ll have to develop strategies to ensure you are always on top of your To Do list.
When you have cracked managing your own work you can help others manage theirs. This is the best way in my experience to make sure that projects come in on time and others take responsibility for their deliverables.
13. Quality Management
Quality management ensures that you deliver a product that is fit for purpose. What project sponsor doesn’t want that? Unfortunately project managers often don’t spend enough time on the quality angle of their projects – it’s one of those processes and set of tasks that are overlooked as an administrative overhead.
If you are a quality expert, then good for you. But if you aren’t, seriously consider upping this on the priority list for 2015. The better the quality of your deliverables, the better value you are offering stakeholders and the more satisfied they will be.
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