5 Key Skills for Expert Project Managers

Are you frustrated with your current career achievements? Believe me, it is natural and at some point in life, everybody faces it. Either they admit or not, but they know it’s painful. So now what do you want to do, continue the frustration or get out of it?

In our field of project management, everybody thinks that if they can get PMP? they can fast track their career achievements. It’s partly true; certification provides instant recognition and helps to get more interview calls but to deliver projects you need to hone your skills, which are beyond traditional certification knowledge.

For years, I am known to make complex things simple; based on my knowledge, experience and observations, below are 5 key skills that one should master over time to move fast in project management arena.

1-   Align Projects with Strategy

Lot’s of project management practitioner complains that management was excited when they initiated the project, but as time passes so does their support. Now they are middle of nowhere.

To make the matter worst, now they have a couple more projects to manage, and they have to juggle their time between them. What traditional wisdom says, work hard, make time, and deliver constantly.

The problem is we are trying to solve the problem from inside the project, rather than outside of it. The outside in solution of the problem is to link the project with its strategic objective. To link project with strategic objectives, first, we need to know, what is our organization strategic objective? The obvious answer would be to go and ask from senior management what is the strategic objective of this project. But interestingly either they don’t know about it, or they haven’t linked the project with a strategic objective.

The easiest way to identify strategic objective is to identify the outcomes of the project. Outcomes are the utilization of project results after handover and it is a good starting point to understand the strategic need of the project. Now with the outcome you can research which area is going to be benefited and how much from the project, and it will guide you towards the strategic objective.

Once you identify your project strategic objective, either from asking a direct question or from some fact-finding, it will help you to get management support for your project.

David Collis and Michael Rukstad, HBR article "Can you say what your strategy is?" [1] will be a good read to understand strategy and will be a good starting point for career advancement.

2-   Engage Stakeholders Effectively

Communication is key to project success. This sentence is echoed for years in project management. It is still true, but with whom we are going to communicate, was missing and now we are focusing on stakeholders.

Problem is we have tools and techniques to identify and analyze stakeholders, but how to engage them throughout the project life cycle is still not there.

Stakeholder engagement is both science and art and needs special attention of project manager. My suggestion is to start from understanding and documenting the stakeholder expectations rather than project needs. It will help to measure what matters the most. This is directly linked with the success criteria of the project, and traditionally we are measuring triple constraints for the success of a project, which is being questioned by the dozen of researchers and finally, PMI also changed their stance on this.

As an effective project manager, to engage stakeholders, I would say use the outcomes of the project as a success measure and then deliver project outputs. It will help to negotiate and set realistic expectations and above all, help you to build a trust relationship with your stakeholders.

APM article, “10 key principles of stakeholder engagement”[2] will be a good read to understand the dynamics of stakeholder engagement.

3-   Design Project Lifecycle

No power, no authority and a responsible project manager. This is more or less the story of every project manager who works in an operational organization.

Problem is we are tracking activities, not phases. Fact is, our project passes from one department to other, and the project manager is only responsible to coordinate. I would say coordination is not bad, but the expectation should be clear. Both the project manager and management should be on one page, regarding the role of the project manager.

A project manager needs to design a life cycle. It is one of the key technical skills of a Project manager. The project manager is responsible to define and discuss how much project management is required for a given project. This would be much easier if the project manager, works with a technical team or PMO to design life cycle for the project. Designing will be easier if we focus on end-to-end delivery from project work to non-project work. Responsibilities should be aligned across project phases and their respective deliverables. In my experience, this exercise early on with your team will help you to manage the project with clear expectations.

"Practice standard of work breakdown structure"[3], from PMI, will be a good starting point for project managers.

4-   Calibrate Risk Management

How many times you feel embarrassed when your boss says you are not proactive or strategic. Year after year, project managers are complaining about this and trying to figure out how to be proactive or strategic.

Problem is, we are searching for the solution in a wrong way. The solution of embarrassment is to identify the risks proactively. Management doesn’t want to hear the problem when it occurs. They want to know about it beforehand, with possible options. I have worked in scenarios, where they even don’t want to recognize any risk at all. For them, it is an early excuse.

The project manager first needs to identify the risks, which can hurt the projects in a bad way. Second, look for other industries and other organizations, which have done a similar project and face the risks. When you only talk about the risks of your projects, it is considered an excuse. when you provide references with options, you start gaining the trust. It is weird I know, but it works, and management responds. The third and most important factor, in this case, is the probability of occurring the event. You need to work on probability factor; this is where you become a calibrated project manager. A calibrated project manager is actually a proactive and strategic project manager.

There could be multiple books, but I would recommend you to read “How to measure anything”[4], by Douglas Hubbard.

5-  Utilize Visual Metrics and KPIs for Reporting

Status is useless. We are not going anywhere with this presentation. Are you going to tell me we are again late? Sounds familiar, the story of management meetings.

Problem is we have set pattern of reports, and nobody challenged to refine it. Sometimes, changing the slide pattern or design of management meetings is considered as corporate fraud. We are trying to hide something from management. We are so much accustomed with red green and amber lights that, we only want to see everything with that.

My recommendation is to introduce graphs and charts upfront and present both lagging and leading indicators. Especially, when you have an audience from diverse backgrounds, and each has a stake in your project progress. Second, don’t just rely on traditional time and cost status, use stakeholder engagements, approvals, active risks, and unresolved issues in your status. Always remember, when you up for management presentation, there are always political aspect and pressure groups. Your words picture and graphs with dependencies should come first.

I would recommend the Dr. Harold Kerzner book, “Project Management Metrics, KPIs, and Dashboards”[5].

At the end I would say, the choice is yours, what you want to achieve, more interview calls or successful projects. It’s better to equip yourself with the right skills to move fast.

References

1:https://hbr.org/2008/04/can-you-say-what-your-strategy-is

2:https://www.apm.org.uk/resources/find-a-resource/stakeholder-engagement/key-principles/

3:https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Standard-Work-Breakdown-Structures/dp/1628256192

4:https://www.amazon.com/How-Measure-Anything-Intangibles-Business/dp/1118539273

5:https://www.amazon.com/Project-Management-Metrics-KPIs-Dashboards/dp/1118524667