Communication Skills on The Project Manager Role

How easy is to keep the stakeholders and team members happy together?, probably the answer to this question is the ultimate skill in project management, the major part of the time for a project manager will be monitoring and dealing the requirements with both sides.

The stakeholders will be pushing to get more features and asking for progress to the project manager, meanwhile the teams members will be facing troubles like bugs, lack of definitions and dealing with technologies or tools issues. Although, a good planning might reduce these troubles greatly, in running time any project might face them anyway. So, here is where the communication skills become in handy, between more information can we provide to the stakeholders that their requirements are being attended or are under the team’s radar, also, between more information can we get from the stakeholders like use cases, requirements or what-they-really-want definitions, this will make the team work faster without waiting for business acceptance criteria.

The second step to approach correctly the project management is relationships, if our stakeholders and team members work closer and each side see that the things are happening in the other side, we could reduce the bureaucracy and work smoothly. Also, something that I have seen in some companies is, they think the project manager aside of management, he is the positive attitude evangelist on all the involved roles, in one part it is truth, because should be the first role who wants to attend the stakeholders questions and be attending every doubt that the team has. Additionally, he should be the guy promoting the good vibes in all the interactions.

As you can see, a big part of the success of any project is tied to the project manager’s soft skills and his experience, in other articles, I will write about other soft skills and how important they are in the process and methodologies available to increase the impact.