Ten Tips on How to Become a Good Project Manager

Project management utilize lots of artifacts such as : Gantt charts, schedules, deliverables tables, action items tracking, assigned tasks and budgets to drive any particular project. However the real “soul” of project management is the capability to work with people, the actual people who have the same common objective for the same project.

Here are some advice to share with you if what you wanted to achieve is as a good PM to drive a successful project:

1. Define the team’s common goal for the project
Everyone has different stake and concerns in each project. The project manager need to spend some time with the team members to get alignment and thoughts on the below:

What are their priorities for the project?
What excites them most about the project?
When and where do they like to meet?
What are their expectations for a project manager? What does a good practitioner/project manager relationship look like to them?

2. Good projects provide great opportunities

3. For the potential to stretch their capabilities, such as to learn new skill-sets
A good project manager should be good in assessing the potential in the team. And the only way for him to be good in this is to get along with the team members well and communicate effectively.

4. The challenges for the current team
Any potential challenges in the team should be made aware to the project manager. This is to make sure the project does not get into any unnecessary pit-falls such as mistakenly assigned unsuitable tasks to any team member when the experience and background of that member has not being reviewed well before the assignment.

5. Encouragement and Guidance
Is the supporting force behind any project. It is common to meet road-blocks and get hit with issues for any project along different phases. It is the responsibility of the project manager to jump into the wagon immediately and help if any of the team member are weak and failing.

6. Plan and schedule
As a project manager, you need to plan logically and schedule for all the phases with considerable time line. Do not plan for anything which you do not confidence of before you get the necessary advise and clarifications.

7. Risk management
Project manager must be well aware of all the potential risks for that specific project where these can be escalated necessarily.

8.Working with the customer/ client
A good customer relationship is extremely important in projects. It is very challenging to manage human being among all other stuffs in this world. The differences in companies culture, department policies and structure as well as business processes are some of the key drivers in the complexities in human relationship.

9. Know your priorities
There are multiple tasks which need to be delivered to enable a project regardless of the phases it is in, be it envisioning, planning, development, stabilizing, or even during deployment phase.

However it is the responsibility of the project manager to be well aware of the priorities for the project at different phases.

Thus, it is the top priority tasks or items which will need to get escalated and expedite in situation of constraint.

10. Make customer service one of the team’s strength
It is imperative to remember that it is the value and quality of the customer service provided which attract and enable regular / previous customers to come back for our service. In order to have great customer relationship, you need to ensure that:

Good mutual understanding between both parties
Honest and trustworthy is the golden rule of thumb dealing with customers

The project’s success depends on how well informal feedback is carried among the team and with external members. It is a challenges for a project manager to be able to highlight potential risks to the project without sounding false alarms. It is proven that the strength and sincerity of a good customer and team relationship are the key driver to make good work great.

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