It may not be ‘Dry January’ anymore and we’re definitely way past New Year’s Resolutions being fresh, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to stop striving for improvement. The best project managers are continually looking to improve and don’t need the New Year as a reason to push themselves forward. However, with the New Year does come a new PM landscape, which means that new opportunities, technology and industry advances arise. It can also mean the development and improvement of best practises such as project management control techniques which, in turn, means more opportunity to learn.
Here are some tips on what you need to help you succeed in your project management career:
You Need To Embrace Numbers
If you’re not keen on budgeting, brace yourself because you must have at least a few basic budgeting skills to be a great project manager. Why? Because every single business has its eye on the bottom line, there’s no getting around it – budgets are as tight as they get. You need to be able to manage the budget just as effectively as managing tasks and schedules, and if you don’t know how to do that you need to get yourself up to speed.
You Need To Keep Calm And Carry On
If you are a negative complainer who turns every issue into a drama and never comes up with solutions, you will never be a successful project manager. The best project managers think critically all the time, which means they are constantly growing their skill set to deal with potential issues and obstacles. Your need to be able to keep calm and carry on when serious issues arise; critical thinking is intelligent, logical, sensible and essential.
You Need To Be Inspiring
If you can’t lead your team to victory, you’re in the wrong profession. You need to be an excellent leader to be a project manager. It is your job to make your team see the bigger picture and to inspire your team and help them feel a real sense of purpose towards the tasks they are completing. It is essential to develop leadership qualities or know how to recognise them and improve them.
You Need To Be Communicative
There is more emphasis than ever before on effective communication which means you need to consider all the technology available that can help you communicate better. Intranet, social media, emails, IM, video calls, texts – the list goes on. So not only are we more able than ever to communicate, we are expected to. The downside of using technological aids to communication is that we need to be able to translate our message into something meaningful without the usual visual or aural clues, which can be difficult for some people.
These are just some of the skills you need to be an excellent PM this year. However, if you always seek to improve and advance your skill set, you won’t go far wrong. Excellent project managers recognise both their skills and their weaknesses and seek to perfect and improve them respectively.
