WHAT MAKES A GREAT PROJECT MANAGER Series 4

Becoming a rockstar project manager requires great skills and best practices.

Project Manager can be a tough role especially when dealing with different individuals daily and trying to keep up with them, regardless of their background, beliefs, culture or what they are going through.

A great project manager must learn how to deal with people in all situations. Especially when making decisions either good or bad.

If the outcome of your decision is bad, it is important to decide to get yourself unstuck, follow through on that action, learn some things and decide to take a new action once you’ve learned.

Do — Stuck — Unstuck — Retrospective — Innovate — Then Iterate!

The process above will help a great deal.

Now let's talk about the core steps of a great project manager:

On a day-to-day basis, project managers usually follow a process that involves planning and organizing, managing tasks, budgeting, controlling costs, and Time management.
Let's delve deeper.

The most appropriate definition of project management has these keywords. Project management is practically valuable to every business, it helps ensure that a project is properly planned and organized, and delivers the expected outcomes, both on time and within budget.

1. Planning and Organizing
   This is the first step in managing a project. This is how a project manager makes use of productivity tools and creates processes. The project manager may need to use certain tools and techniques to do tasks like gathering requirements, creating a schedule and sharing information.
   Creating project plans is a key part of project management. It helps set the tone of the project, keeps everyone on pace and aligned, and helps move tasks along.

“When gathering requirements from teammates or customers, you will need to figure out what exactly your project’s trying to accomplish.”

A sample process below:

• Gather requirements
• You might have a kickoff meeting or send a survey
• 1:1 calls with teammates or customers
• Work on creating project plans

2. Managing Task
This is how a project manager keeps track of the team’s workload, ensures that things are getting done within a set period, and demonstrates progress to people outside the immediate team, like stakeholders both internal and external. See a sample process below:

• The project manager helps manage tasks for the team members
• Communicates key milestones to the larger team or customers.
  This helps keep team members, and customers updated on how the project is progressing.

3. Budgeting and Cost Control
This is how a project manager oversees the financial components of a project and mitigates project issues and risks that may come up.
Budgeting and control are important skills a project manager should have.

4. Time Management
Effective time management allows project managers to meet deadlines, optimize resources, prioritize tasks, proactively manage risks, and make efficient decisions. It contributes to the successful completion of projects.

This enhances stakeholder satisfaction, and establishes the project manager as a reliable and effective leader.

Finally, there are four specific skill sets that I think can help a project manager be successful.

Decision-making, Communicating and Escalating, Flexibility, and Strong Organizational skills.

Decision Making: You should always provide accurate/relevant data or feedback that will help your teammates make an informed decision between choice 1 and choice 2.

Noting that every decision made has a consequence and might affect the business.

Communication: You must have constant communication and inform your team/stakeholders about changes and keep them in check.

Project management requires communicating project goals and expectations, team member roles and responsibilities, and constructive feedback.

Knowing how to effectively communicate and when to escalate issues to management is key to keeping you, your team, and your organization on the path to success.

Flexibility: Flexibility is important as the only constant thing in life is change. Be open to change, this helps in innovating and catching up with your competition or the trend. Resilience is a vital part of Flexibility.

I’m resilient and my teams are resilient. If we’ve taken a bad action, we’ve learned that we can learn and change our minds with new information. Experience is the best teacher.

Strong Organizational skills: You must keep projects on track and organized at all times. One way to do this is by utilizing the abundance of organizational tools available, such as:

• Planning and scheduling software (templates, workflows, calendars)
• Collaboration tools (email, collaboration software, dashboards)
• Documentation (files, plans, spreadsheets)
• Quality assurance tools (evaluations, productivity trackers, reports)

Highly recommended: Atlassian Jira doesall the magic above. Get started here

You may also need to experiment with different organizational approaches to determine what works best for you and your team.

Knowledge of helpful tools and templates and familiarity with popular project management styles like Waterfall and Agile can help you organize and document the project throughout its lifecycle.

Conclusion:
The most important thing to know about the day-to-day of a project manager is this:
🔸 You must learn how to communicate effectively, even under pressure
🔸 You’ll use different tools, techniques and methodologies every single day.
🔸 There’s never a dull moment.
🔸 You will watch the project’s growth from start to finish.
🔸 You will learn how to create something from nothing

Working from the ground up to Excecution is a satisfying feeling. Booooom you are a ROCKSTAR

Thank you!
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PS: Check out more articles I wrote to understand more about project management.