What is Project Management?
In easy words, project management means the overseeing of projects. However, if we dig it down further, project management is not that simple. It is the implementation of expertise, processes, methodologies, knowledge, and aptitudes to get particular project goals achieved. These goals also have dedicated and strict guidelines, timelines, and other parameters. Project managers and teams are bound to achieve those goals staying within the budget and timescale.
Why is Project Management Important?
Project management is vital for every company irrespective of its size, industry, and nature of work. Many organizations have already understood the importance of project management. This has given the chance to many individuals with good managerial skills to dive into this career. Since this is not only a trending venture but among the staying ones. Also, project managers are paid generously for their skills.
However, there is till a chunk or organizations who haven not accepted the crucial nature of having project managers to manager the given tasks and deadlines. The result for these organizations is just as small and poor as their perspective. Without proper pre planned, well documented, and agreeable project contract, it is nearly impossible to meet the deadlines, achieve the goals, and make the clients and employees satisfied. Therefore, it has become vital for associations to come out of their delusional world and start taking project management seriously. It is a high time when all the organizations should understand the necessity of having project managers to oversee each task and begin hunting them.
These project managers will be responsible to plan, initiate the project, assign the tasks, get them executed, and control and close the project with clients’ satisfaction. Also, the proposed timeline and budget of the project keeps varying depending on the client and nature of work, project manager is also responsible to communicate with the client, collaborate with his teams and come up an attainable budget and deadline.
For this, a project manager must have certain skills that he should portray in interview and job screening process and organizations must investigate those skills before taking a project manager on-board. See those essential project management skills below.
Must Have Project Management Skills
1.Expert Planning
A project manager is an expert planner. By planning we don’t mean someone who can give an overview of the tasks, dates, budget. Project management relies hugely on planning strategically. A project manager must identify the tasks first, evaluate the available resources, skillset of his colleagues, nature of the project, client’s budget, and project requirements. Only then he will be able to design a successful plan with achievable goals. A good project manager recognizes the strengths as well as weaknesses of his team and take the decision effectively. Identifying organizational strength and shortcoming help big way in coming up with a successful plan.
2. Cost Management
Another great attribute of a skilled project manager is his estimation of the correct cost and cost management. It is a must skill for every aspired and working project manager to learn. Cost management helps in planning and controlling the complete project cost and eventually in aligning the expense with the budget. Moreover, by a proper cost estimation for the project, choosing and assigning resources to the tasks become easier.
3. Negotiating Skills
Negotiation is another important attribute of a project manager. This helps the project manager to get the right budget from the client to be able to complete all the requirements and achieve the goals. Also, negotiation is not only limited to the clients but also with senior and junior employees. When people use control to negotiate, they can steer the conversation better and help their cause. To deal with clients and employees’ negotiation is an important skill to learn.
4. Risk Management
It is the process to identify and analyze any potential risk that can happen. Usually, there are many things that can go wrong during a project lifecycle. A project manager is responsible to identify all such uncertainties and take preventive measures right away. Risk management helps in avoiding any big loss or harm that would have happened if not resolved rightfully.
5. Resolve Conflicts
Everything checked and done. What if a conflict rises? Who will resolve this? A project manager. He should be ready to face conflicts anytime in the project lifecycle and must know how to resolve them gracefully and professionally. As a project manager, this is his responsibility to avoid the conflicts as much as he can and if there is one, then find a solution and maintain the workplace peace.
6. Time Management
Time management is the key to success in every step of life. Same is the case in project management, a good project manager knows the value of time and effectively manages it. He is pre planned, his vision is clear, he has the answer to every possible question, these are some of the main tasks he does do make sure he is not wasting his time, clients’ time, and employees time. If he can handle the time management and assign each task with a time limit, company will never exceed the deadline.
7. Effective Communication
A project manager has done everything right, but he forgot to communicate it with the team or the client. Result, project is a disaster. Therefore, it is very important for a project manager to do effective communication with all the stakeholders involved. The better is the communication the successful is the project.
8. Leadership
A project manager is a leader. Until and unless he doesn’t know how to lead, he can never be a good project manager. His leadership skills help him in managing people, resources, tasks, and job efficiently. He knows when to work as a team and when to make the command. It is important for a project management to learn leadership to achieve the organizational success along with the project success.
All these are a must have in becoming a project manager. This way, one can take the management role of any project in any niche or of any nature ranging from projects on developing, researching new market leads or leading a team on a marketing project and so on. So, if you are looking to become a great project manager, you can do this by simply acquiring PMP certification after clearing the test as this cert covers every skill to make you a successful project manager. You can also take PMP certification training online to learn the necessary skills to pass the exam and get certified.
