What Are the Most Important Project Management Skills?
Project management as a concept consists of several not-easy objectives, including the initiation, planning, managing, controlling, and releasing projects. Any project is like a baby that needs permanent control and care.
How to be successful in this area? The best project managers use smart project management tools to keep all aspects of their projects organized. However, the tools will not help if you are lack of professional skills.
Here I combine 9 professional skills every project manager should have. You may certainly add more or replace them in accordance to the importance but be sure — if you have these, you have the foundation on which to build a successful career as a PM.
9 Essential Project Management Skills
Skill # 1. Leadership
Leadership is the golden key. Probably this is the most important quality, not only for a project manager but for any kind of person who manages. There will be no successful future if you are not a leader in project management.
There is a quite discussible opinion that you’re born with leadership skills and that they can’t be taught. Let’s believe that everyone has the potential to learn how to develop and apply leadership skills.
As a PM, you’re responsible not only for seeing the project through to a successful completion, but you’re leading a team to achieve that goal.
Skill #2. Communication & Negotiation
If you are a true leader, then you probably know everything about productive communication. That’s true: communication opens doors.
Actually, it’s not only about communicating with your team. You’ll also need to have clear relationships with everyone associated with your project, from contractors and stakeholders to customers.
That’s why it’s rather important to pay attention to collaborative exercises and team building games, to choose appropriate communication channels and services. The right techniques and tools will help to connect people one-to-one and in group settings.
Negotiating skills may be also mentioned here as they are closely related to communication.
Negotiation does not only mean haggling for the best price from a vendor or contractor. Managing a project means you are in constant negotiations. If you’ve strong negotiating skills you can resolve disputes before they blow up and threaten your project.
Skill #3. Scheduling Mastership
This skill can be called as more specific and necessary to project managers.
Experienced project managers know that it’s a doubtless way to achieve their projects goals within the timeframe that has been decided on is to break down those goals into tasks on a timeline.
This scheduling means setting up a realistic schedule and then managing the resources to keep on track. It allows projects to be successfully concluded on time.
For these aims, you may use friendly product roadmaps based on Gantt charts, which provides a visual of the schedule with tasks, durations of those tasks, dependencies, and milestones. Here’s how roadmap can be visualized:
in Hygger:
in Productplan:
or in Receptive:
Skill #4. Risk Management
Risk can be detected in any business. Planning any project is inherent with risk, no matter what size or nature of the project is. It’s the main responsibility for PMs to recognize, assess and control risky issues before they become problems.
Project managers cannot anticipate everything that might happen over the life cycle of the project. There will be unanticipated issues for sure, so it’s crucial to have a process in place to handle those when they come up.
Skill #5. Cost Management
It is a misconception that with a good budget you can reach all the peaks. Any budget requires smart management.
When you get a budget, your first task is to make sure that the budget is realistic and can meet the financial needs of your project. Controlling those costs through the execution of the project is the second main thing here.
Usually, it takes a great deal of skill and time to figure out how to squeeze every cent out of the limited funds. However, there is nothing impossible.
Skill #6. Task Management
This technical skill also looks like a must-have in a project leader’s skills portfolio. There is no project without tasks, as tasks are like a clue that holds everything together.
Obviously, project managers need special tools to help them manage the tasks more efficiently. This tool should optimize collaboration with a team, help to prioritize and give instant status updates when tasks have been completed or are running behind.
Skill #7. Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is the skill that helps to be as objective as you can in analyzing and evaluating an issue or situation to form the right judgment.
Every day you face challenges while working on a project, and you want your decisions to be impartial. The only thing guiding your decision should be what’s best for the project.
Skill #8. Quality Management
Perhaps, quality management is not the most obvious skill that is often overlooked by project managers. However, it’s worth to get more attention.
This kind of management is overseeing the activities and tasks that are required to deliver a product at the stated level indicated in the project paperwork.
Skill #9. Time Management
Project managers always care about how other people spend their time. But it’s equally important to be aware of how we are managing our own time.
It’s crucial to realize the difference between urgent and important. There is a proven opinion that daily or weekly meetings are some of the biggest thieves of time. PMs should pay attention to the meeting’s agenda, timing, and frequency.
Successful project managers also respect their teammates’ time, so being able to read the body language of people is also critical.
Conclusion
Perhaps, being a successful project manager is just a talent. However, keeping your work organized and your teams informed and satisfied is critical to the total success and professional PM skills are what you need to achieve all these.
Is this list of skills proper to you? How good are your project management skills? Feel free to comment on this post.
