Essential skills for project management
Lessons-learned from the classroom
Teaching young students who want to improve their management skills is as fun as it is challenging. After all these years of experience, I can rely on various anecdotes and stories from my own consultancy practice, which undoubtedly contribute to the way in which students process the material. And yet teaching remains a constant challenge because project management can be viewed through so many different lenses that students sometimes have completely different expectations from a project management course.
It is of course up to the teacher to respond to these changes, and to provide the students with the necessary baggage that is really relevant for their later practice. Moreover, the skill set required for project success has been broadened and drastically changed to such an extent that it is sometimes good (and necessary) to take a critical look at the content of the course.
In a recent class experiment, which has been running for a number of years, I wondered whether I could identify the necessary skills that project managers should possess, and test whether they are indeed covered in my course. A sensitive subject, I quickly noticed, but that does not alter the fact that my view could add something to this theme. Thanks to the willingness and sometimes hard cooperation of my students, of course.
The skills of a project manager
A lot of research has already been done into the necessary skills that a project manager should possess, and names are usually thrown around, which sometimes makes it unclear what is really meant. Moreover, the rich array of necessary skills is often divided into categories that everyone has an opinion about, and no one really agrees with the correctness of the classification and the specific content of each skill definition.
I just want to say that I have contributed little to a better or finer description of the specific skills for project management, and certainly have not concerned myself with an improved classification. However, based on a thorough study of the existing literature, we started our own research study on project management skills with the help of a wide range of students with different backgrounds.
A skills is an ability to do a specific activity well because you have practiced it over and over again.
Our breakdown of the necessary skills was kept simple after careful consideration, with a distinction between the technical skills and the people skills, which eventually led us to 7 necessary skills for good project management.
Technical skills (the hard skills)
- Understanding is a skill that indicates whether people fully comprehend the idea behind methods, processes, procedures as well as their assumptions, limitations and contributions.
- Analysis allows people to break down problems into subproblems and systematically diagnose them using rational principles. This skill is often referred to as ‘analytical thinking’ or ‘systems thinking’.
- Calculus reflects the closeness of a measured, estimated or calculated value compared to its actual value. This skill thus reflects the correctness of the applied methods and the resulting calculations.
People skills (the soft skills)
- Communication is the ability to openly listen to opposing views and clearly convey complex ideas and thoughts with the aim of improving.
- Criticality requires taking outside knowledge into account while evaluating information with the aim of making a sound judgment.
- Holistic implies a broader view based on knowledge of the different components of a project, portfolio or company in relation to the whole organisation. Many researchers refer to this skill as ‘organisation’.
- Creativity corresponds with the ability to adopt techniques and general concepts to the needs of a specific situation. Creativity thus includes out-of- the-box thinking as well as flexible and effectively changing your toolbox for the best fit with each situation.
The methodology
We examined the performance of 349 students who completed a data-driven Project Management course module followed at various universities in Belgium and UK. The course consisted of a series of 5 case studies for the students to solve, describing the full life cycle of a project. This lifecycle starts with creating a plan, analysing the risk, monitoring the project during execution and taking corrective actions in the hope that the project can ultimately be delivered to the customer within time and cost limits. The five case studies were taken from my book “The data-driven project manager: a statistical battle against project obstacles”.
Based on the case study evaluations, we tracked the level of the students on various technical (data) and non-technical (people) skills. The seven previously mentioned management skills were linked to a variety of benchmarks to map the importance of each skill. We then statistically examined the relationship between these skills and student performance during the course module. This relationship has been investigated using the Structural Equation Modelling technique, a fairly simple and standard multivariate statistical analysis technique used to analyse structural relationships (cf. figure below).
Lessons learned
Much to our delight, the results from our experiment were better than we could have expected. Not because we came to surprising or new insights, but mainly because we were able to statistically confirm what we usually already knew or at least suspected.
- Experiment 1. Influence of skills on student performance: Both soft and hard skills had a clear impact on student performance. We did notice that the hard skills were especially important during the start and end phases of a project (for making a plan and following up on the projects), while the soft skills were important throughout the entire project lifecycle.
- Experiment 2. Skills Improvement: What I liked most was that we noticed that both hard and soft skills improved as the course progressed. Logical, you would think, but still nice to measure and know this.
- Experiment 3. Importance of skills in project phases: The results clearly showed that not all seven skills were equally important in every project phase. For each phase, a combination of soft and hard skills was important, but the later phases required more skills (“planning is easy, control is difficult”) than the earlier phases. In addition, we saw that the analytical skill — one of our technical skills — is the one skill that is always important.
They say that education is our passport to the future that belongs to the people who prepare for it today. More than anything, I believe that education lays the foundation needed to have confidence in our abilities and helps us find the necessary skills and our passions in life and career.
It is not surprising that so many teachers show such a strong passion for their lecture.
After all, it gives great satisfaction to color a small part of the future of young people.
It feels good to know that my project management lectures make a small contribution to this future.
If you use this article, please cite: Servranckx, T., & Vanhoucke, M. (2021). Essential skills for data-driven project management: A classroom teaching experiment. Journal of Modern Project Management, 9(1), 123–139.
