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Improve Project Success With These Project Management Skills

Project’s success highly depends on project managers and their skill sets to manage the project effectively. In today’s competitive talent pool, you need to acquire all the project management skills to become a successful project manager.

There is a thin line between a qualified project manager and a certified project manager. Qualified professionals possess all the skills required but certification validates their skills, education, experience, and expertise. Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification helps in improving the skills required to manage all types of projects. It opens the doors to go ahead in the career. The project management skills to be improved for project success are:

• Leadership
• Communication skills
• Time management
• Negotiation skills
• Decision-making skills
• Risk management

1. Leadership

A good leader has the ability to bring the best out of the team with soft skills. The motivated team always gives the best result. A project manager with great leadership qualities lead the team, manage a team, motivate the team and get the work done in an effective manner. The team should be led in both strategic and operation’s perspective.

Project managers can possess effective leadership quality by the following ways that can improve the success rate of the project:

• Social- Influence: The performance of the team can be influenced by conformity, socialization, obedience and peer pressure. The productivity of the team can be improved by improvement in work culture. The opinions, emotions, and behavior team members are affected by the project managers.
• Clarity: Clear vision towards goal. Without a clear vision of the consequences, the team cannot be led by the project manager effectively.
• Inspire team members: Project managers should make things happen. The inspiring team is making team members work willingly.
• Motivate team: The motivated team always gives the best result. The team can be motivated by appreciation, opportunities, and rewards.
• Guidance: Project managers guide the team by providing all the required information clearly.
• Setting Measurable goals: The common goals are to be set by project managers. The timeframe required to reach the objective is set to accomplish the common goals.

2. Communication skills

The impact of communication is very high in project success. Communication is one of the most essential skills required to improve the success rate of the project. The effect of the project manager’s communication has an impact not only on the project but also on clients and stakeholders. Communicating clearly is one of the primary responsibilities of project managers. The changes are to be communicated to all the team members. The following skills include the best practice of communication skills:

The following modes of communication can help in improving the success rate of the project:

• Group meetings
• Email
• One-on-one meetings
• Status reports
• Updates
• Telephonic call

Great communication skills include:

• Active listening
• Clarity in discussion
• Confidence
• Responsiveness
• Respect
• Reach on agreements
• Result oriented
• Addressing important issues
• Resolving issues

Poor communication can mislead the project and result in project failure or delay.

3. Time management

Time management is the most important aspect of project management. Planning helps in setting goals and provide a definite path to reach the project objective. A strategic mindset is important for effective planning. Planning includes defining the project activities of each team member to achieve the project objective in constrained time without any obstacle.

It is completely project manager’s responsibility to deliver the project on time.

Keeping track on the project status and individual project activities helps in proper time management

The standardized time tracking tools and schedule templates are used to keep the transparency of the project.

4.  Negotiation skills

Bringing a group of people to settle the differences in order to accomplish the common goal with the agreed resource, budget and time. A good project manager is always a good negotiator. Negotiation always comes with a settlement. In any disagreement, people bring out the best possible outcome. The project manager achieves a desirable outcome of the discussion if PM is a good negotiator. There are two types of negotiation

• competitive negotiation
• collaborative negotiation

The negotiation skills a project manager should possess to improve the rate of project success are:

• An ability to set goals and limits in order to reduce conflict management
• Excellent listening skills
• Effective verbal communication skills
• knowledge of when and how to close the negotiation.
• Reducing misunderstandings is a key part of effective negotiation
• Rapport Building.
• Problem Solving.
• Decision Making.
• Assertiveness.
• Dealing with Difficult Situations.

5. Decision-making skill

Decision making skill is the most important skill a project manager should possess. Some decisions on a daily basis are not much important but there are some critical decisions that lead the project to be successful. The character of the decision should be:

• Rational
• Unbiased decisions

The decision can be taken in the following steps:

• Identify the problem – Recognize the problem in the project process and gather all the information required to take the rational and unbiased decision.
• Summarize all the information
• Figure out all the possible solutions–  find all the possible solutions and ideal way to resolve preferably in a group. Consider all the points and do not ignore anything
• Produce objective criteria – generate the measurement criteria to check the feasibility of the solutions.
• Decide what is best – Make a decision based on what is best for the successful completion of the project within a constrained time.
• Implement the solution – implement the solution decided
• Track the results – Track the outcome of the implemented solution.

6. Risk Management

The project manager identifies the risk at an early stage to avoid the impact of risk on project progress later. To predict the uncertainties, the streamlined risk management process is carried out. Risk identification and analysis are done throughout the project lifecycle to reduce the impact on the resource, processes, technology, and schedule.

In risk management,

Identifying the source of risk -  The potential risks are listed out based on the previous projects.

Risks identified are categorized in:

• Technical
• External
• Organizational

Risk Analysis is done by performing two processes:

The qualitative Risk Analysis process

In order to set the risk priorities, the analysis is done on the probability of the risk, the impact of the risk on the project and other risk parameters affecting the project deliverables. The main objective of performing qualitative analysis is to predict and reduce the uncertainty of the risks.

The quantitative Risk Analysis process

Performing quantitative risk analysis is the process of numerically analyzing the effect parameters of identified risks on overall project activities. This process helps in further prioritization of risks, reducing the uncertainty.

Risk Responses are planned against the identified risk:

The process of developing action plans against the identified risks to reduce the overall impact on the project. Planning the risk responses involves selecting strategies and agreeing on the actions developed.

Implement Risk Responses process

The process of implementing risk responses involves executing all the actions planned against identified risks to reduce the uncertainty of the project.

Monitor Risks process

The process involves monitoring the implemented action plans against risk identified. This process involves tracking risk responses, analyzing new risks and reducing the risk factor throughout the project.

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