Diigo

Ensuring that you have the right skillset and tools is an essential step to becoming the consummate project manager. No matter what industry you work in and regardless of the scope of your project, having the right skills will allow you to lead your team to success. Here’s a brief overview of the skills you’re going to find the most valuable. Cultivating them now can save you time, headaches and failures down the road.
The Ability to Lead
As a leader, you have to have the ability to lead. Leadership skills aren’t inborn, they’re learned, which is good news for those who find they aren’t natural leaders. Leadership requires several different things, including accountability on your part. You also have to be recognized as the leader, which requires more than just holding a PM position. Your team needs to know that you have the knowledge and experience required to successfully guide the project, answer their questions, anticipate problems and conclude the project.
Communication Skills
There are few skills you’ll find more in demand as a project manager than communication skills. You must be able to communicate with a wide range of individuals, from team members to stakeholders within client organizations to your own management. What’s more, your communication has to be accurate, timely and direct. You will need to have the right communication tools to help, as well. Email, instant messaging, project management software and even smartphone/tablet apps can help. Communicate successfully throughout your project, and you’ll find you’re much more successful and that problems are not as insurmountable as they would otherwise be.
Solving Problems
While your team should handle many problems on their own, there will be many instances where you’re called upon to solve an issue. Having strong problem-solving skills is essential for project managers. That means you need to be able to analyze a problem, determine what’s going on and what elements are involved, and then plot a course that gets around the issue. Being able to develop alternative solutions that still move the project forward and align with the organization’s goals is also an important part of this.
Organization
If you’re not organized, you’ll find that leading a project to a successful conclusion is an uphill battle. Keeping track of myriad documents, sorting and passing along essential information, tracking project progress towards task and milestone completion and maintain a schedule are only a few of the things that you’ll have to do. As with communication, the right tools and software will help here. Collaborative software, programs designed to help you track and store documents and many other helpful options are available for those who aren’t natural organizers.
By cultivating these skills and ensuring that you have the right tools at hand throughout the course of your project, you will not only see better success in your immediate project, but be able to be more successful in the future as well. Becoming the consummate project manager requires skills, but you’ll find help, tools and training available.

Are you stepping into the role of project manager? If so, it’s a whole new world out there, to use a time-honored turn of phrase. While your education, training and certification program gave you the tools and skills to handle quite a few things, there are some things that can only be learned through experience. Rather than going into it unprepared, knowing some important elements ahead of time will help ensure that you’re ready for what’s to come.
Realize It’s Your Responsibility
One of the first things you need to understand is the amount of responsibility that will be on your shoulders here. No matter what type of project you’re running, its success or failure will rest directly on you. Whether your project is a smashing success or a dismal failure, it will reflect on you. Even if the project fails because of things outside your direct control, it will be your ultimate responsibility. Understand this from the outset and you’ll do better.
Beyond Your Team
Project managers have to work closely with their team and others involved in the project. However, as the PM you’ll have to deal with people that the project affects who might not technically be part of it. It’s important to understand that some of these people will take a dim view of project management and you as the project manager. This is particularly true for client projects, where the client is spending their hard-earned money to pay you to manage the project. Realizing from the outset that you’ll meet with both approval and disapproval based strictly on your role is vital.
Foster Participation
Touching once more on the theme mentioned above, you’ll have to deal with a wide range of different people in your project, from team members to managers and executives. One of the most important tips for new project managers is to ensure that you make participation as simple and easy as possible for those involved. New software can help make this painless – robust systems allow everyone the ability to communicate, share thoughts and ideas, record data and transmit documents/records while in their office, or even when on the road if you use mobile technology. By taking steps now to ensure easy communication, you help streamline your project while keeping everyone in the loop.
Know Your Stuff
As the project manager, you’ll be expected to know a little about everything within your project. You cannot afford to be a specialist. You have to be a jack-of-all-trades. You need to ensure that you’re familiar (at least passingly so), with every team member’s area of expertise, understand their roles, understand what the project is about and what it is supposed to achieve. Know a little bit about a lot of different things – you’ll find that your job is much easier if you do.
With these simple tips, new project managers will find a smoother transition into their new roles. While there will still be snags along the way, your chances of success are much higher.