What key skills should a project manager have?
The good news is that all the skills I will discuss can be learned. However, if you already have natural talent for a few of them, then project management is likely something you could learn to be great at. Let’s go through the key skills one by one.
Organisational skills
If you are a naturally organised person you will have a huge advantage as a project manager. It will literally help you to keep order in the project and keep chaos out of the project. Chaotic projects are usually doomed to fail. You’ll know a chaotic project when you see it, some of the key characteristics include –
- No clearly documented plan for delivery
- Constant unexpected issues
- Resources are off doing their own thing and working in silos
- Everything seems to be late
- Constant re planning
- No-one seems to understand what is going on!
That probably sounds awful but it does happen. That’s not what we want. We want an orderly project with a unified team. Specific examples of being an organised project manager include –
- Booking meetings well in advance
- Documenting and storing clear meeting minutes
- Defining clear roles and responsibilities within your team
- Updating your project plan at least on a weekly basis (ideally daily)
- Not losing things that you write down
- Storing your project documentation in one place
- Keeping your document versioning up to date
- Having clear objectives for your meetings
- Knowing what your resources are doing at all times
Now, having said all that, it is actually possible to be a good project manager even if you are not organised. I know because I used to be one! I am not a naturally organised person. I had to learn how to become organised and it took a lot of will power to get the right habits in place. I found when I wasn’t organised, I was wasting a significant amount of my time on silly things like trying to find important emails, repeating conversations/meetings because I had forgotten what was said the first time round, reacting to issues that could have been avoided by looking further ahead, or arguing with stakeholders about key decisions that were made months ago because I hadn’t documented them properly. As a result, I often found myself working long hours.
Despite this, I was still recognised as a good project manager because I was great at solving problems. I was also a good leader who could create a strong team spirit and I could drive the plan ever forward. However, it is so much better to be organised because you don’t waste as much time.
If you have the budget, sometimes you can bring a project management office (PMO) assistant into the team to help you with organisation and admin, however, this tends to be a luxury!
Communication skills
As a project manager, most of what you do will require communication. That communication may take the form of meetings, emails, workshops, instant messenger, phone calls or presentations. Good communication is really important because it is vital that people understand what you are telling them! You always want your team and your stakeholders to be clear on what is happening and what you need them to do. If you don’t, then issues will start to crop up and your project could go south very quickly.
Of course, if you speak perfect English and your grammar and spelling is polished, it will certainly help your communication….but that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is that you have the ability to get your message across, and know if you have been understood. If you can do that, it doesn’t really matter if your English is broken or your grammar isn’t perfect. No-one cares.
It’s also important that you are able to adapt your style of communication to the audience. You need to take the person’s role, relationship to the project, and seniority into account before you open your mouth or send that email.
A specific and important communication skill to have as a project manager, is the ability to articulate a complex idea simply. You need to be able to articulate things in layman’s terms. Moreover, you need to guide your technical team members in doing the same thing for you. If you are able to do this, it will really help to bring people along on the project journey, and allow you to manage something ‘tangible’ that you understand.
Stakeholder Management
By ‘stakeholders’ we mean anyone who has an interest in the project. It is critical that you keep your stakeholders well informed of the project’s progress. You need to keep your stakeholders happy but you also need to ‘keep them in line’ to some extent. This is called stakeholder management. Poor stakeholder management will often lead to problems on your project.
Having good ‘people skills’ can help your stakeholder management. If your stakeholders like you, your job usually becomes easier. However, liking your stakeholders and them liking you is not essential for good stakeholder management. Having a good relationship with them is more important. Forming a good relationship with your stakeholders is achieved by understanding their needs, meeting their needs (when appropriate), keeping them well informed, being clear, being honest, and doing what you say you are going to do. Doing this builds trust, and a stakeholder who trusts you is easier to manage.
Being a driver
Being a driver in this context means having the ability or will to ‘drive’ the project forward. It means being mostly pro active rather than mostly re active. It means taking personal responsibility for delivering the plan and doing everything you can to make sure it stays on track. It means really caring about the success of the project. It means chasing people up so that tasks are completed on time. It means holding people accountable for what they say they are going to do. It means creating a sense of urgency in the team. It means being assertive. This is how you drive a project forward. Be a driver.
I believe that being a driver is one of the most predictable qualities of a really good project manager. It doesn’t take long to realise you are working with a driver. Likewise, it doesn’t take long to realise you are not working with a driver. It’s one of those qualities that you either have or you don’t. Project managers who are not drivers tend to be more like project ‘monitors’, they’ll observe and report on the progress to plan rather than truly push the project forward.
I personally believe that being a driver is the most important skill for a really good project manager.
Facilitation skills
What is facilitation? Facilitation is the art of moving a group of people through meetings, planning sessions, or training and successfully meeting a specific goal. As project managers, we need to facilitate outcomes. That outcome could be a deliverable (like a project plan), the resolution of an issues, the agreement of a decision, the resolution of conflict etc etc.
One of the reasons project managers can manage projects in different industries, is that we don’t need to be experts in the field/area of the project we are working on. We just need to have strong project management skills. Because we do not know much, we are very reliant on the people who do. That is why facilitation is so important, because it’s our team that have the knowledge. We need that knowledge to nail the scope, to build the plan, to solve the problems etc. We need to draw this knowledge out, and we do it through facilitation. Facilitation is not rocket science, it’s done by things like –
Getting the right people together
Creating opportunities for debate and for people to share their ideas and concerns
Asking the stupid questions
Focusing the meeting and keeping it on track
Being clear with objectives
Pushing the team to keep coming up with new ideas
For events like workshops (e.g. planning workshop or requirements gathering), you can often get someone else to facilitate them for you (like a business analyst). However, facilitation is such a huge part of the project manager role you may find it difficult to succeed if you don’t get good at it.
Of course, there are other many other project manager skills, but I believe that this are the top ones. If you nail these, you’ll be an excellent project manager.
Project Manaverse 