Improve Your Project Management with These Essential Skills
Learn to balance project goals with team-building techniques
November 2, 2022
Some people seem to embody the job they choose. When an inquisitive kid grows up to be a lawyer, a constant daydreamer becomes a fantasy novelist, or the innovative problem-solver evolves into an inventor, the career path they take monetizes a part they’ve played their whole lives.
While innate talent is important, the good news is that most job skills can be learned. All it takes is some hard work and dedication. So, if project management, or management in general, doesn’t come easily to you, you’re in luck! These skills can be taught. This article will give you a brief overview of the skill requirements for someone in the position of project manager.
The requirements for most jobs are a mix of hard and soft skills that help in accomplishing the day-to-day tasks that the role requires. Hard skills are specific to the role at hand. For a graphic designer, a hard skill would be proficiency in illustration software, or for a building contractor, it would be knowledge of building codes. Soft skills are what you’ve learned along the way that may not be specific to the job but are useful for the position. For example, for a team leader, expertise in PowerPoint would be a soft skill that helps them in assembling and delivering presentations.
Hard Skills
These are a combination of project management tools, training, and on-the-job experience. It takes all three to be a competent project manager.
Risk Management
Risk management is the ability to assess a new project in terms of its potential for profit against the possibility of loss. The pros and cons of each decision have to be carefully weighed before choosing a course of action. You have to be attuned to the stakeholders’ interests throughout, ensuring that every member of your team is working in alliance with those interests.
An important aspect of risk management is to be aware of the risk tolerance the company can afford. Is every project required to turn a profit or is there a margin for experimentation? Are you in the building phase or is your company an established name? Is the management open to high-yield/high-risk ideas or do they like playing it safe?
Swit is an excellent tool to analyze and assess the feasibility of a new project. Swit’s Google Sheets can be color-coded to reflect opportunity/liability at a glance. The Goals plug-in ensures that the project stays on track, while task cards provide transparency and accountability.
Cost Management
When charged with a project, you will either be provided with a budget or tasked with creating a cost estimate for approval. Either way, a detailed report of how and where the money will be spent is pragmatic. Allocate for emergency and contingency spending.
Cost in project management is one part of the triple constraints every venture requires. Cost, Time, and Scope; all three are interdependent. Your job is to adhere to your budget while sticking to a timeline and staying within the confines of the project’s scope.
Using the custom fields available in task cards, you can create detailed cost estimates. These can then be linked to your goals for the quarter using the Goals plug-in. Now the cost, time, and scope are connected so that all three can stay on track. The Approvals plug-in can be used to get cost estimates and budgets approved by a project manager or multiple department representatives.
Reading and Writing
This may seem like a no-brainer, but reading comprehension and clarity in writing are often overlooked. These skills should be mandatory for just about any role, especially for a managerial position where effective communication with your team, your leaders, and your stakeholders constitutes a large part of your job.
As hybrid and remote work models become the norm, the ability to be concise and clear in correspondence holds the utmost importance. As part of your role, you may be required to interpret jargon-heavy documents with technical or legal information.
Swit’s Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 integrations make team collaboration possible in real time on documents and spreadsheets. Chat channels and the comment section in task cards keep the communication flowing and allow you to course correct whenever needed. It also saves previous correspondence for context and transparency.
Planning and Forecasting
A part of your role is the ability to predict outcomes by analyzing data collected from previous projects.
Swit offers several ways to view task distribution and progress, like Timeline, Gantt, Bucket, or Dashboard. You can use filters like team member, due date, or priority status to view specific data to ensure that your project is on track.
Swit’s new Goals plug-in is a great tool for planning. It allows individuals and teams to add in Objectives and the Key Results that will help achieve those objectives. Together these OKRs can feed into the overall goals of the company. Linking OKRs to projects and tasks you are working on adds accountability and transparency to your work.
Resource Management
A delicate balance needs to be struck between the available human resources, the task at hand, and the deadline. A manager should be aware of the capabilities of each member of their team, and how much each member can take on without getting burned out.
Swit’s task cards have the option to add assignees and collaborators. This allows team members to take ownership of the tasks they are working on. They also hold themselves accountable if they are unable to meet deadlines.
Soft Skills
These are skills that usually come through experience. They aren’t specific to the role of project management but are essential to be effective at it.
Leadership
A manager is a guide that leads the way for their team. Your job is to ensure deadlines are met and things run smoothly. At times you may have to coax your team or your boss into adopting your way of thinking, and this is a difficult art to master.
It requires management and leadership skills to feel comfortable doing things like facilitating meetings, holding participants accountable, and enforcing constraints. You are faced with the difficult task of providing leadership on a project without having any of the decision-making powers.
If you find yourself in a leadership role then Swit is your biggest ally. You can keep the channels of communication open throughout the lifecycle of a project. Saved backlogs create a digital paper trail that provides both transparency and accountability.
Communication
Your job is that of a mediator between your team and your bosses. You are who the team will approach, to voice their concerns and complaints. You are also the one your boss will question if the project doesn’t live up to expectations. Our goal is to reach a compromise that makes both groups happy.
Communication needs to be a two-way street. Productivity can really suffer in an organization where communication is ineffective or constricted.
Swit’s Zoom integration comes in very handy for one-on-one or inter-departmental meetings to ensure that everyone is on the same page. You can view everyone’s calendar, schedule meetings, and send invites easily through Swit.
Time Management
As mentioned before, one of the three constraints on a project is a time frame. A manager’s job is to make sure that the team meets its deadlines. Reallocating resources and shifting priorities in order to stay on track is a vital skill.
Inevitably, there will be times when despite your team’s best efforts, deadlines cannot be met. You should be able to foresee such complications and alter course. Swit’s Timeline view makes it easy to adjust deadlines as and when the need arises.
Adaptability
No matter what industry you work in, a measure of tech savviness is important because much of your role is understanding and properly using project management software, as well as other tools for things such as analytics, document creation, and communication.
Soft skills like adaptability and flexibility are equally important here, too. You have to exhibit a willingness to learn and adopt new technology and techniques before you can learn the hard skills to use them.
For in-depth information on Swit and ways in which to practice your hard and soft skills for project management, tune in to Swit’s weekly webinar.
You can also get in touch with our sales team to learn more or schedule a custom demo.
Nyda Ahmad, Copywriting Manager
