Must-have Hard Skills for Project Managers

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Photo by Leon on Unsplash

A solid team can contribute to the broad range of skills needed to complete projects successfully. However, project managers must possess several skills to ensure project success:

Construct risk response plans. Although team members can identify risks, the project manager handles building and managing sound risk responses. Because the PM is the project liaison to the sponsor and senior leaders, the PM must be able to discuss, adjust, and deploy risk responses effectively.

Recognize schedule feasibility. Lots of schedules that are built don’t reflect reality. For example, feasible schedules include realistic expectations for team members’ weekly allocation the project. Schedules must also include realistic estimates of the effort to complete tasks. And fast-tracking or crashing built in the schedule must be sensible and doable. The PM must be able to spot these pitfalls and correct them. 

Domain expertise. The PM must know enough about the project’s technical domain to work with technical domain experts. In other words, the PM shouldn’t be fooled by experts trying to escape probing questions. For example, a project manager experienced in IT won’t have an issue talking to experts deploying new IT tools. That same PM, assigned to a construction or mining projects could easily be deceived by “the experts.” Project managers can successfully manage projects without specific domain knowledge. However, that situation introduces risk and increases project personnel costs because domain experts need to partner with the PM.

Knowledge of both the technology and business environment. A project’s business outcome often requires different knowledge than what you need to know to build the deliverables that facilitate that outcome. Consider a hospital project to provide advanced medical diagnostic services. Understanding the financial and marketing objectives of the project is much different than understanding the technology used in the sophisticated medical diagnostic equipment that interprets medical test results. The project manager, who works with the team and customers, needs to understand both: what’s needed to produce deliverable as well as the viability of the business outcomes. 

Vendor and contract management. In projects involving significant contracted skills or components, the project manager must be able to manage vendors and their contracts to ensure that deliverables are created efficiently and interactions between vendors are in the project’s best interest, not the vendor’s. For example, customized technical components built for a project require the project manager to validate contracts as well as integrations between those components and other parts of the project solution.

Strategic thinking. In projects that significantly alter business direction, the project manager must be able to think strategically to ensure the approach supports specific project goals and fits into the sponsoring business’s strategic direction.

What other hard skills do you think project managers absolutely must possess?

For more about project management, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

 

Tips for Launching Projects Successfully

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Photo by Leon on Unsplash

The fate of most projects is determined by how they’re launched. With a proper launch, the project has a good chance of succeeding. Botch it and the chance of delivering value is almost zero. Here are my top tips for nailing the project launch:

  • Develop a shared understanding of the project. You and your project team might have a solid grip on the project and what it will produce. One key to project success is making sure that your sponsor, project customers, vendors, and other key stakeholders also have a common, shared view of the project, its objectives, and how you will deliver business outcomes. Communicate meticulously to all stakeholders to create this unified project understanding. Without consensus, turf wars can arise, which can compromise funding, slow the project, and are difficult to recover from. 
  • Define metrics and targets. One of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is “Begin with the end in mind.” To do that, you need to define “the end!” Before you start a project, identify the target metrics and success criteria, so everyone understands early on what success looks like. If you don’t have tools to measure results, include tasks in your project plan to create those tools. Get consensus up front on how those tools will work, where the data comes from, and how the metrics will be calculated. Disagreement over measuring success not only kills projects, but does so at a very inopportune time — late in the project lifecycle.
  • Identify the skills required to deliver the project and how you will acquire them. A project team with the correct skills significantly increases your chance of project success. Many projects suffer from underestimating the challenge new techniques and technology present to project teams. People think “we’ll figure it out” or “our internal staff can learn.” That may be so, but you need to validate those assumptions early on. Work with your team to determine what they can and can’t learn. If using internal team members is impractical, include the availability and cost of consultants/contractors in your estimates. 
  • Touch base with powerful, out of scope stakeholders. Why would you work with stakeholders whose interest is out of your project’s scope? Because big issues can arise if they believe their business interests should be addressed in your project, and they find out they won’t be. Communicate with these would-be stakeholders in conjunction with your sponsor to ensure they understand their business interests are out of scope. That way, no big change requests land in your lap, creating tension and complexity in your project.

Do you have tips for launching projects that have helped you achieve project success?

For more about project launches, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Improve Your Leadership Skills with Emotional intelligence

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As project managers, we don’t simply manage work, deliverables, and documentation – we lead and support the people on our project teams. Emotional intelligence (also known as Emotional Quotient or EQ) helps us do that. Here’s how enhancing your EQ can help:

  • Relate to people working from home. Working with others is challenging even when you work side by side. Interacting with people onscreen amps up the level of difficulty. Although some people work from home and love it, others wish they were in the office. EQ helps you relate to and support your team members through their struggles. Your supportive leadership makes all your team members feel more comfortable with their work environment, which means a better chance of meeting project objectives.
  • Deal with people under stress. Stress creates obstacles for project managers and can significantly decrease project success. Stress often arises from business challenges like reactive decisions, irrational or missing responses to project problems, and fear about speaking the truth regarding project difficulties. With solid EQ, you will be able to recognize the root cause of these issues. Work through stressors with your stakeholders to ease their minds and deliver project outcomes.  
  • Manage excessive workload. Many businesses suffer from too many concurrent projects, competing operational responsibilities and being short-staffed – whether in your business or third parties you contract with. Pushing a schedule and managing to deadlines doesn’t guarantee progress. To negotiate deadlines and obtain staff to complete tasks, you need to understand the delivery pressure others are under – and that takes EQ.
  • Work across cultures. Project managers often work with people from different cultures, whether they represent different geographic regions in your country or different countries altogether. We are all human and have the same emotions behind our reactions. However, how emotions are triggered can vary across cultures. The higher your EQ, the more you will recognize these emotional triggers and the signals indicating the presence of emotions. That enhances your ability to work with stakeholders, no matter their cultural background. 
  • Apply change management if needed. Success goes beyond delivering project deliverables. For example, installed software doesn’t represent a successful result if the client isn’t tech-savvy and requires training and support to achieve the desired benefits. You might need to apply change management to achieve business outcomes, which requires skill, leadership expertise, and EQ. Whether you perform change management or depend on change managers, you need to understand what drives successful change management, which takes EQ.

For more about Emotional Intelligence, check out Gemma Leigh-Roberts Developing Your Emotional Intelligence course and Britt Andreatta’s Leading with Emotional Intelligence course.

Tips to Reduce Project Chaos

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People problems, business pressures, and creating unique results come with unexpected challenges. Dealing with chaos is one more thing project managers must do. Here are a few tips for reducing project chaos.

Research past lessons learned. Capturing lessons learned is often like wishful thinking. People talk about doing it, but rarely get around to it. If that’s the case in your organization, don’t give up. Instead, ask project managers and sponsors in your business about the problems they’ve seen on their projects. If your organization has a lessons learned database, examine it thoroughly. By understanding past issues, you can build insightful risk and contingency plans. And those plans can help you quickly identify the root cause of potential issues and address them before they create chaos in your project (and your life!) 

Watch for changes in stakeholder behavior. When stakeholders get stressed, their behavior usually changes. They might get more talkative, less talkative, or voice concerns about your project out of the blue! Don’t just wonder what that’s about. Initiate 1-on-1 discussions with stakeholders to identify what’s going on with them. Showing compassion for your stakeholder and your project outcomes creates trust, which can lead to learning more about potential problems. That leads to greater insights and less chaos!

Evaluate and respond to baseline variances. Be sure that you understand your baseline metrics for scope, schedule, cost, and quality. When Those metrics are off by more than 5%, determine the cause of that variance. And when the variance goes beyond 5%, jump into gear to get things back on track — and share the status and your actions with your project sponsor. Proactive communication about issues and responses can instill confidence in your project leadership, which means fewer “please explain” type of meetings, and – you guessed it — less chaos!

Focus on what’s important versus what’s urgent. If something is important and urgent, by all means, focus on that first! After that, work on important issues and don’t get distracted by urgent yet unimportant things like a ringing/chirping telephone. Minimize distractions by turning off your phone, pausing email notifications, and hanging a do not disturb sign on your door. That way, you address the most vital tasks on your project. Less chaos! 

 

Projects will always involve unexpected or sudden changes. These tips can calm things down for you and your project team. Do you have tips to share for reducing project chaos? If so, share them in the comments!!!

 

For more about reducing project chaos, check out Chris Croft’s Project Management: Solving Common Project Problems course.