The role of a project manager is key to the development of a project.
He is a person dedicated to ensuring that the gears of each of the parts of the project can work correctly.
It is important to say that there are many skills of a project manager that can bring great benefits to the project, there are a series of basic concepts that it must be able to master.
There are 4 groups of skills that must be present in the skills of a project manager regardless of the project, size or industry in which it is developed.
These skills contribute to a project manager being successful within the project and therefore making the project a success.
Create an environment conducive to decision-making
It is often thought that project decisions should only rest with the people in charge of the project.
Although there are levels of decision making, it is a mistake to think that empowering a work team to make decisions is a secondary activity.
High-performance teams have a key characteristic, and that is that they feel capable of making decisions to improve their work and the project in general.
In the same way, the project manager, when generating this environment, must provide the people, both the team and those interested in the project, with the necessary information for decision-making.
Given that the main objective is that the sum of goals achieved among all team members results in the success of a project, the project manager must enable that the decisions to achieve these goals can be taken.
This point also takes into account that the project manager must have the ability and information available to in turn make decisions in time and with the appropriate impact.
Within this same aspect, a fundamental part is to effectively communicate the decision-making that impacts more than one member of the team.
Communication and escalation
As a project manager, the use of communication skills will be present in all aspects and activities that are carried out.
Whether documenting plans, sending emails, creating minutes or even face-to-face conversation, the project manager has to be a channel of constant communication.
Within this process there is an aspect that requires a lot of sensitivity, and that is to scale elements of the project to people outside the original problem, or even to high-ranking personnel within the project or organization.
This aspect is commented as highly sensitive, since it can often be tempting to sound the emergency alarm at the slightest detail.
However, the project manager must be able to analyze each situation, who must be informed and make a quick analysis of the seriousness of the situation.
Once this information is defined, then the project manager can then escalate with the information, appropriate severity, and the correct people to fix the problem.
Flexibility
A project manager is by definition a planner, from the zero moment of the project, to planning what will be the last activity, planning is the day-to-day of the project manager.
Despite this requirement, the manager has to have significant flexibility, whether in the face of plans, requirements or various aspects of a project.
A project is like a living entity, always changing, evolving.
The bigger, more people involved and greater scope, the changes and adjustments will be greater.
These adaptations may occur constantly, no matter how detailed the planning has been, the flexibility to adapt to change is key to survival.
A good project manager knows that changes in the work team, requirements and even in the external environment (government, society, nature), are practically guaranteed in a project.
The only constant is change, the project manager must remain calm under the pressure of change and guide the team during this process.
Well-established organizational skills
This should be a project manager skill, appropriately transferable to team members.
The use of organizational tools, both for yourself and for team members is an increasingly common constant today.
Having strong organizational skills is to coordinate the project processes, no matter how different they may be, so that as a whole they add to the global objective.
The project manager ensures that all tasks are monitored, all data captured and that key elements of completion or milestones are met.
This is through organizational measures, application of team and personnel management methodologies.
Examples of these organizational systems can be spreadsheets, project management software such as Microsoft Project or Asana, or task managers for teams such as JIRA.
The use and coordination of these tools is part of the skills of a project manager, where they must standardize their use in the project configuration document.
It is a project manager’s commitment to constantly update these skills in order to increase their efficiency and contribution to the benefit of the project.
Within the knowledge that the project manager must be constantly updated are:
- Management tools
- Templates and good practices for each of the project phases Project management
- Styles and structures Project management
- Methodologies and success stories
- Generation and maintaining high-performance teams
