Project management skills help to assure project success
What project management skills are essential to a project’s success? And, how do you make sure you have those skills in place on your team, as the project launches? We have identified the following:
- Coordination
- Accountability
- Flexibility
- Time management
Let’s examine each of these in terms of what is required and how the skills can be acquired.
Project management skill 1: coordination
What it is: By coordination, we mean organization and the bringing together of the various individuals and tracks of activity. This coordination allows the whole project to move forward, on-time and on-budget. Project management is called on to tackle large-scale, complex projects. By nature, “large-scale” and “complex” imply many tasks happening simultaneously. Leaders must wait to start some tasks until earlier tasks, in yet other areas of the project, are completed. This kind of complexity requires coordination.
How to get it in your project: To achieve coordination in your project, be sure that you assign a team leader to the project as a whole, and to each major track of activity. This group of team leaders should meet once a week — or every two weeks at most — to review the overall plan, the progress to–date within each track of activity, and any challenges that have arisen.
Project management skill 2: accountability
What it is: Accountability is most simply defined as responsibility for an activity. For any project management plan, it’s essential to assign accountability to individual team members for completing the work of the plan.
How to get it in your project: Just as there are layers of work within a project, there are layers of accountability. At the highest level is the project manager. He or she must be assigned accountability to the organization for keeping the project running on time and for maintaining communication with the organization’s leadership, on progress, problems, and help needed.
Each major track of activity in a project should also have leaders assigned and accountable for results on that track. Track leaders should report to the overall project leader regularly, provide assistance to their team members when needed, and secure help from the organization where required.
Finally, to have a successful project, each team member who is assigned an individual task, must be held accountable to get the work done on time, and must report his or her progress to the team on a regular basis.
Hand in hand with coordination (discussed above), accountability is best monitored through weekly or bi-weekly meetings. Two caveats: The purpose of accountability checks, or assessing progress, is NOT meant to lay blame and point fingers, but rather to get help and to solve problems. People will shy away from accountability if they sense that the intent is to make them wrong, rather than to get them help when needed. Second caveat: The purpose of accountability is to get the work done; not to assess the results or the impact of that work. For that, we need flexibility, which is the next project management skill.
Project management skill 3: flexibility
What it is: Flexibility in a project is critical. Problems will arise, tasks that were intended to result in one thing, actually result in something else; some tasks take longer than predicted; a key team member leaves. The ability of the project team to assess what is happening on the project, set a course correction, and design the needed changes into the project plan, is a primary key to the project’s success. That is flexibility.
How to get it in your project: At the weekly meetings, the project team must assess progress on all those steps that are due or are in-progress, to date. Have problems or challenges arisen? Is there new information that wasn’t available before? Is the work on the project having its intended impact? Based on the answers to these questions, the team should make any needed modifications to the project plan, and roll out those changes.
Project management skill 4: time management
What it is: Time management, on a large project, is essential to getting the project done on time and on budget. When multiple, interdependent tracks of activity are occurring simultaneously, the need for good time management is critical.
How to get it in your project: When laying out the initial project plan, a start and finish date should be assigned to each task of the project — not just the overall project. Once each task has been assigned a start and stop date, the team can follow the flow of time for the longest track of activity to determine the critical path, or minimum amount of time the project will take. Monitoring this timeline weekly is essential to keeping the project on track for being completed on time. The team can provide help on tasks falling behind, adjust tasks, and so forth, to keep the project moving forward as planned.
Dynamic Planning™, the tool that incorporates all these skills
Dynamic Planning™ is a project management tool, developed by Professional Growth Systems, that integrates all these needed project management skills. To learn more about it, click here, or to read about Dynamic Planning™ with one of our clients, click here.
Interested in learning how to use Dynamic Planning™ for your project?
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