The essential skills needed to be a project manager
When searching for a new career, that is one of the most common questions — people usually think about their personal skills to drive them to choose a profession. Once we start as project managers, it is common to understand that skills are good for managing a project, but learning the techniques and tools is equally important when taking care of our projects. Project management is about something other than being organized in your personal life — our lives could be a mess while we could be great project managers.
According to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements.
A project can be more straightforward, such as planning our vacation. On the other hand, it can also be challenging, such as planning to build a brand new stadium full of details, risks, and uncertainties. Indeed, understanding what a project is, its phases, and knowledge areas is the foundation to let our skills support the activities we should execute to achieve the goals necessary to accomplish what we planned.
Nevertheless, understanding how to act in technical terms and using tools to support our skills is the foundation to help us in any situation. Once we know our projects’ goals or specific concerns, we should know which tools we can use to achieve these goals. By “tools”, you can understand using an agile framework or even find solutions to drive your team to the most productive way using your experience and what you’ve learned to manage a project.
Let’s give a real example to figure out a common situation when dealing with projects.
As project managers, we constantly need to adapt to all human beings surrounding us in a project — people tend to carry their personalities with their weaknesses and strengths. We sometimes can’t decide who will be working with us when handling projects. In cases like that, we should maximize how we communicate with everyone to try to get everything they know to contribute positively to the project. However, we know that sometimes a member of your project is only partially motivated or not delivering their best. That is the moment you think you should be a very communicative person, graduated in psychology to understand the deeper soul of your colleagues, and that’s where techniques and tools are here to help us when you don’t hold a specific skill.
The above example shows how project management concepts are an excellent path to finding the best solutions to a common situation when dealing with people and projects. Even in an agile framework such as SCRUM, this may be necessary. Here we are thinking about motivating one or more team members — some tools and techniques will help us build or improve our skills.
Following our example, the SCRUM framework has a ceremony called Sprint Retrospective. It’s an excellent tool to support your team in discussing what’s working and what needs to be improved and defining an action plan for the team or individuals for the next sprint. Sometimes these issues are widely discussed among the team members, and sometimes you won’t need to speak a single word to solve these problems. In this case, you just gave the team a tool to support them in discussing what’s not good for them individually or even considering relationships between team members. Sometimes, it won’t work, and you’ll need to adapt to find alternatives, but that’s what is impressive when we talk about project management, there’s no correct answer to every situation — it would be necessary to adapt to the given scenario, as well the time and space we are filling into.
Use your skills in your advantage
Now that you understand that you don’t necessarily need to own a skill to become a project manager, you can also learn it. Here are some skills that will help you begin this career.
Communication
During our time working with teams, we learn that communication is the key to becoming a better project manager. The essential skill to move on is communicating with your team and stakeholders — the project’s information should flow symmetrically through all team members and stakeholders. Assuming that only some people need to know everything, you should be sure that every team member equally understands the information given. If someone understands your plan differently, problems may appear ahead, and sometimes it may cost you more than a delay in delivery.
Leadership
First, we should understand that we’re talking about something other than the old fashion Leadership we were used to seeing in the past. The contemporary leader understands his role in the organization and empowers his team to make decisions instead of being the master of everything — that’s what Management 3.0 guides us through. Besides that, leadership is something you need to learn and improve every day, but that’s a skill that some people are used to learning since school or previous careers, for example.
Finally, it’s essential to understand that once you want to study project management, you might not think about the skills that aren’t your stronger version but focus on those skills you own and try to build a knowledge base that will undoubtedly support you to develop new skills from that base you need to start from.
Understand that as an individual, you have your skill set and will need to learn to improve other skills. It drives us to a solid career — waking up daily knowing that we want to learn and try something different to change our minds and adapt to every problem.
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