What New Skills & Technology A Project Manager Should Learn or Possess – Part 2
CRITICAL THINKING
A good project manager will decide to prioritize according to the requirements and business objectives of the project. To bring this into practice a project manager should have a bird’s eye view and should see the big picture. Individual tasks will be important only when they support the larger goals of the project. What is the development initiative of the organization? How to execute each task by following the processes and methodologies laid down by the company. Risk management and accessing of risks is also very important part a project manager has to consider while executing a project. For all possible challenges, it is critical to be proactive and realistic. Before starting a project ask yourself a few questions as to what may possibly go wrong and how to rectify it in case it actually goes wrong. Check PMP.
TIME MANAGEMENT
Imagine a situation, which is chaotic and project manager is not able to manage his time completing tasks properly. What will happen? You cannot be bad at everything but one thing a project manager should be perfect is time management, at least for situations in hand. The core responsibilities of project manager lies in doing scheduling of employees and project tasks, and planning all of it briefly. He should be aware how long a particular task would take to execute. Creating a project plan is the first and foremost task of a project manager. Planning will make sure to build series of actionable items and core sequences so one can create a schedule for each phase of the project. Normally Gantt charts are useful for this process. They will assist in monitoring your project and give a basis of your schedule created. Correct time management is to reduce disruptions and interruptions to all team members. Anyone working in offices very well aware that meetings consume a lot of time which might be unproductive many a times than not. Try to reduce meeting time as possible and keep for only necessary meetings. A project manager skills regarding time management is to understand when to hold a meeting, for how long it should be running and focus on very critical things to discuss in meetings. PMI membership renewal fee.
REVIEW
All the project managers must have the ability to brief and review earlier projects to know what we learnt from mistakes done in the previous projects and how to eliminate them during the on-going project. There will not be a single project, which will execute without challenges and hurdles, the skill of the manager lies in mitigating those challenges and try and run the project as smoothly as possible. A helpful and right way is to get into past projects and have a retrospective meeting, the goal of this meeting should be to reflect on the project and make improvements for the future projects. To provide an honest and a constructive feedback to all team members. As a project manager, you should give an opportunity to every team member to contribute and share their ideas and thoughts with others. Once all the information and details are collected, put to practical use for example, one developer finds that time given to develop a particular feature is too short and there is not enough information or details provided under requirements, as project manager. It’s your duty to make sure such lapses are not repeated in the future when allocating time to each individual for finishing a task or completing a feature development.
This will give you the competence in process management, methodologies, tools usage, and the psychological elements required to handle the complex projects efficiently. Use of matrix management techniques with committed members of project who report directly into other line functions. Pass rate of PMP exam.
ANGER MANAGEMENT
This is often the most critical and very important skill a Project Manager must possess and which is often neglected aspect from the Project Management field. There will come many instances where a Project Manager will often feel low or depressed, especially when things are not going as per the way they should progress in his or her project, and when this situation continues for a prolonged time then the patience of a person starts to get tested and that is where anger would start creeping in and it would affect the project managers subordinates.
The subordinates start feeling the pressure from their respective project managers and those who are not able to handle the pressure or challenges being thrown at them, they start to falter and make mistakes and that in turn affects the quality, progress and productivity of the project, which in turn puts burden on the budget of the project and it starts to increase putting pressure on the finances of the company.
The other repercussion for a project manager is he starts facing opposition from his team members if the pressure starts getting over board and reaches a point where the team members are not able to handle it. So they start requesting the higher management to be either removed from the particular project and to be put in some other project or try and remove the project manager who is managing that particular project.
This aspect is very detrimental to the career of a project manager, as it’s considered as a black spot and when the word spreads that this particular project manager has anger issues and is not able to handle the team effectively with harmony and co-operation, then more and more people become reluctant to work with that project manager, also the management becomes hesitant to give him any important or critical project to him or her.
As a good and efficient project manager one has to control his anger and make sure all the team members are respected properly. If any team member is making mistakes, then talk to him separately and make him understand how important the project is with its timeline and quality and what all steps the team member should take to avoid making mistakes in the future. PMP exam passing rate.