Become Effective PM

Become Effective Project Manager

- Effective Project Manager
	- Value
		- Tasks prioritization
		- Tasks delegation
		- Communication
    - Impact organization
    	- Focus on customers
    	- Build a great team
    	- Forster relationships and communication
    	- Manage project
    	- Break down barriers
    - Responsibilities
    	- Planning and organizing
		- Managing tasks
		- Budgeting and controlling costs and other factors
		- Teaching and mentoring
		- Building relationships
		- Controlling change
		- Empowering your team
		- Communicating status and concerns
    - Roles
    - Working with cross-functional teams
    	- Clarify goals
    	- Get Get team members with the right skills
		- Measure progress
		- Recognize efforts
    - Core skills
    	- Enabling decision-making
		- Communicating and escalating
		- Flexibility
		- Strong organizational skills
		- Handling ambiguity
    - Interpersonal skills
    	- Communication
		- Negotiation
		- Conflict mediation
		- Understanding motivations

How a Project Manager Adds Value

Value of a project manager

Project managers shepherd projects from start to finish and serve as guides for their team, using their impeccable organizational and interpersonal skills every step of the way. They add values to their teams including

effective prioritization of tasks required to complete a project
delegation: match tasks to individuals who can best complete the work
effective communication with team and with key stakeholders
Stakeholders: People who are interested in and affected by the project’s completion and success, like the leader of an organization.

How project manager impacts organizations

Focusing on the customer

Customer: A person or an organization that defines the requirements of the project and sets important guidelines, such as budget and deadlines
- Internal: stakeholders within your organization, such as management, project team members, resource managers, and other organizational departments
- External: customers outside of your organization, such as clients, contractors, suppliers, and consumers.
Project managers can add a lot of value to the project by building relationships with customers and taking the time to make sure the customer is heard and satisfied with the result.
How to focus on the customer in a project: Sit with the customer and ask them questions like
- - What is the problem you would like us to help solve? Example response: The customer wants help developing a new process that would allow their company to be more efficient.
  - How is the problem impacting your organization? Example response: The customer states that they are losing clients because of their current inefficient processes since clients are sometimes receiving their orders late.
  - What prompted you to ask for help now? Example response: The customer says that they may lose department funding if they do not improve efficiency.
  - What is your hope for the outcome of this project? Example response: The customer states that their ultimate goal is to increase the speed at which they fill orders without sacrificing quality.

Taking the time to dig a little deeper into the “why” behind the project can help a project manager better support and understand the customer. The more you understand the customer’s goals, the more likely you will be able to produce what the customer is seeking.

Building a great team

Project managers add value to the project by identifying the right team for the project and enabling the team to be successful and make decisions.

Consider the skills needed for the project, as well as the resources available
Understanding the customer’s requirements helps shape the skills needed for your team.
Bring on people with the right skills and ensure the team knows that each individual is valued, trusted, and appreciated
Demonstrate how you feel about the team’s value by allowing them to have input and ask questions, and by addressing their needs as soon as possible.

Fostering relationships and communication

The project managers who add the most value are the ones who take the time to build relationships, communicate, and treat others with consideration and respect.
Project managers can set the tone for a project and build relationships within their teams and with stakeholders.
- Taking the time to check in daily with your team, see how they’re doing, and ask if there is anything they need help with can go a long way towards making them feel valued and heard.

Managing the project

A successful project manager sees the impacts of each process within the project and communicates those impacts to the team. -> This ensures that everyone working on the project understands their task goal as well as the big picture goal for the finished product.

Breaking down barriers

A project manager adds value to a project when they break down barriers, allow their team to innovate new ways to do things, and empower them to share ideas.

Provide support for your team as they try new approaches to find solutions
Advocate for additional resources for your team

Project Manager Roles and Responsibilities

Responsibilities

Planning and organizing

Make use of productivity tools and creating processes
Create plans, timelines, schedules, and other forms of documentation to track project completion, and maintain those documents throughout the entirety of the project.

Managing tasks

A project task is an activity that needs to be accomplished within a set period of time by you, your team, or your stakeholders.
Keep track of tasks
- Help manage the team’s workload and ensure that things are getting done
- Also a great tool for demonstrating progress to people outside the immediate team

Budgeting and controlling costs and other factors

Monitor and manage the budget
Track issues and risks
Manage quality
Remove unforeseen barriers

Depending on the project and organization, you may also have responsibilities that utilize your interpersonal skills.

Interpersonal skills are the behaviors you use to interact with others, such as communication, active listening, and leadership.

Teaching and mentoring

Involves supporting each individual on your team in meeting expectations and helping them to exceed their own sense of personal potential
Taking the time to fully explain the expectations can eliminate rework, confusion, and frustration
Allow your team to make better choices and build on your experience

Building relationships

Getting to know your team members lets them know that you care about them as people, not just as employees.
Build relationships with your customers, clients, vendors, and other stakeholders
Dedicate time to check in with people
- Pay attention to the insights they offer you about their work style
- Ask about their lives beyond the project, and then follow up on those discussions later on to show your interest.

Contolling change

Remain flexible and adjust to the stakeholders’ needs
Protect your team from constant change and rework
- Documenting the initial expectations of the project and clearly identifying the changes being requested
- Understand the budget and schedule impact of the changes and make sure that the stakeholders understand those impacts.

Empowering your team

Give your team the ability to work directly with the stakeholders and their teams
Delegate responsibilities to them, allow them to make some decisions for the project, and use their input in the planning and execution of the project

Communicating status and concerns

Roles

A project manager is not often the direct manager of the people working on a project team. He is someone who manages the tasks of a project.

As a project manager, your job isn’t to be the expert on everything. Instead you’re responsible for guiding your team and making sure that they have the support that they need in order to complete the project.

Hold all team members accountable for their assigned tasks
Ensure that issues and risks are tracked and visible, and establish escalation paths
Understand and help teammates adopt the right workflows and project management styles
Collaborate with other teams at the organization to meet the requirements based on project, scope, schedule, and budget

Working with cross-functional teams

A cross-functional team includes team members who have different backgrounds, types of expertise, and job functions. Even though these team members have different skill sets, occupy different roles, and may even work in different departments, they are all working towards a common goal: the successful completion of your project.

Ideas of Working with cross-functional teams:

Clarify goals

Ensure that each member of the team understands their role, how they support each other, and the common goals of the project
- Set clear goals for the team and make sure that the team understands those goals
- Be direct and concise, avoiding extraneous details and explanations.
When communicating task or project goals, make sure you define key items, such as budget, deadlines, quality requirements, or important resources
Ensure your team members understand task and project goals by encouraging them to ask questions and clarify information
Continuously check in with your team to make sure they’re all moving towards their goals, staying on track, and completing quality work

Get team members with the right skills

Measure progress

This helps everyone see the full picture and recognize their impact on the project, and keeps them motivated
Ways to measure progress
- Meeting key milestones
- Completing project tasks
- Meeting project goals on time and within budget
Regularly communicate with your team members to check on their progress. Ask them if they anticipate being finished on time.
- If not, ask how you can help them succeed.
Make sure you communicate successes, delays, or issues, to the team so they know how the project is progressing. Keeping everyone informed is essential to the project’s success!

Recognize efforts

Make sure that each member of your cross-functional team recognizes the value of their efforts each step of the way
Learning what makes your team members feel supported, giving and taking feedback, and being mindful of each individual’s background, personal identifiers, and work style can help mediate some of the differences among team members.

Acquiring Core Skills of a Successful Project Manager

Core skills

Enabling decision-making

Make the decision-making process collaborative $\rightarrow$ Help team members feel empowered from the start of the project
Empowering your team to express their opinions and make their own decisions
- Allows you to focus on the overarching management tasks and prioritize them in order of importance
- Helps foster an environment of responsibility, accountability, and team closeness

Communicating and escalating

Knowing how to effectively communicate and when to escalate issues to management is key to keeping you, your team, and your organization on the path to success.
When escalation is required, try to approach management with both the problem and the potential solution or suggestions.

Flexibility

Assess external constraints
- Take external events into account (such as national holidays and team member vacations and sick leave)
- Leaving extra time in the schedule for these inevitable events up front to help minimize the impact
Plan for risks and challenges
- Assess risks by looking at historical data. Review your past projects and examine the challenges you faced. Then evaluate if similar challenges could occur in this project and prepare accordingly.
Calculate “float” in your schedule
- Float/slack: Amount of time you can wait to begin a task before it impacts the project schedule and threatens the project outcome
- Identifying float in your schedule can help with resource management, scheduling, and keeping your project on track.

Strong organizational skills

Stay organized through efficient tracking and communications by utilizing the abundance of organizational tools available
- Planning and scheduling software (templates, workflows, calendars)
- Collaboration tools (email, collaboration software, dashboards)
- Documentation (files, plans, spreadsheets)
- Quality assurance tools (evaluations, productivity trackers, reports)

Handling ambiguity

Keep calm
Express empathy
- Try to understand what your team is thinking and feeling
- Let your team members know that you care about the challenges they are facing and are there to support them
Communicate what you know clearly
Make decisions and stick to them
Trust the expertise of your team

Leadership and team dynamics

Using your interpersonal skills is key to building relationships with the people involved in your project

Learn about the need and concerns of the team
Help you determine the priorities of the project and motivate your team throughout the process

This is called influencing without authority - a project manager’s ability to guide teammates to complete their assigned work without acting as their direct managers.

Example

Let’s say you have a coworker who’s constantly late to every meeting. While you can’t force them to arrive on time, it’s likely that you’ve thought about ways to motivate them to want to be on time. In doing so, you might have also wondered how to change the way you communicate with your coworker, to influence them to be on time. Maybe you’ve tried asking them to arrive 15 minutes earlier than the rest of the group or maybe you’ve told them how this behavior impacts the rest of the team. Both of these strategies are examples of influencing without authority, and they serve to encourage specific behavior.

Key interpersonal skills include

Communication

Checking in with teammates to understand how they’re progressing on a task
Providing clear feedback on the quality of a teammate’s work

Negotiation

Negotiation might include working with a teammate to compromise on a new deadline when they tell you that they won’t be able to complete their work on time. This can be frustrating, but you’ll need to use your negotiation skills often with your teammates and stakeholders to balance their needs and what is best for the project.

Conflict mediation

Understanding motivations

Getting to know your teammates and figuring out what pushes them to do their best work
Learning how your teammates prefer to receive feedback, and how they like to receive recognition for doing a great job. Use that individualized information to motivate and encourage each person on your team.

Last updated on 2024-09-14

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