Vital Skills for Project Managers – An Overview
Ensuring that you have the right skillset and tools is an essential step to becoming the consummate project manager. No matter what industry you work in and regardless of the scope of your project, having the right skills will allow you to lead your team to success. Here’s a brief overview of the skills you’re going to find the most valuable. Cultivating them now can save you time, headaches and failures down the road.
The Ability to Lead
As a leader, you have to have the ability to lead. Leadership skills aren’t inborn, they’re learned, which is good news for those who find they aren’t natural leaders. Leadership requires several different things, including accountability on your part. You also have to be recognized as the leader, which requires more than just holding a PM position. Your team needs to know that you have the knowledge and experience required to successfully guide the project, answer their questions, anticipate problems and conclude the project.
Communication Skills
There are few skills you’ll find more in demand as a project manager than communication skills. You must be able to communicate with a wide range of individuals, from team members to stakeholders within client organizations to your own management. What’s more, your communication has to be accurate, timely and direct. You will need to have the right communication tools to help, as well. Email, instant messaging, project management software and even smartphone/tablet apps can help. Communicate successfully throughout your project, and you’ll find you’re much more successful and that problems are not as insurmountable as they would otherwise be.
Solving Problems
While your team should handle many problems on their own, there will be many instances where you’re called upon to solve an issue. Having strong problem-solving skills is essential for project managers. That means you need to be able to analyze a problem, determine what’s going on and what elements are involved, and then plot a course that gets around the issue. Being able to develop alternative solutions that still move the project forward and align with the organization’s goals is also an important part of this.
Organization
If you’re not organized, you’ll find that leading a project to a successful conclusion is an uphill battle. Keeping track of myriad documents, sorting and passing along essential information, tracking project progress towards task and milestone completion and maintain a schedule are only a few of the things that you’ll have to do. As with communication, the right tools and software will help here. Collaborative software, programs designed to help you track and store documents and many other helpful options are available for those who aren’t natural organizers.
By cultivating these skills and ensuring that you have the right tools at hand throughout the course of your project, you will not only see better success in your immediate project, but be able to be more successful in the future as well. Becoming the consummate project manager requires skills, but you’ll find help, tools and training available.