Summary

The skills of project management are skills of communication, motivation, and leadership. Communication skills include being able to read people's emotional states, knowing what to say in appropriate situations, and knowing how to listen. Motivation includes being able to motivate other people to do what you want, and when. Leadership includes knowing how to organize and motivate people to get work done.

What project managers do

There are two kinds of project managers: those who want to be heroes, and those who want to be managers. The heroes are the first to try new and daring approaches, and to take risks that others wouldn't take. But they are also the first to quit. Management, on the other hand, knows when enough is enough. It has the stamina to stick with a project, even when the odds are against it.

The heroes and managers both need skills. The heroes need creativity, courage, and endurance. The managers need some of the same skills, plus some new ones. Creativity. A good project manager needs to come up with new and better ways to get things done. The tools of project management are familiar - plans, schedules, budgets, and so on. But they only work if you follow them. So a good project manager needs to be creative: to come up with new ways to organize people and resources and workloads.

Endurance. It isn't enough to come up with a new way to do something; you also have to be able to follow it through. A good project manager needs the endurance to follow through. Courage. A project manager has to stand up and admit when the plan is flawed. It's always easier to keep on doing something, especially when it has worked in the past. But a good project manager has the courage to admit when it is time to stop.

What it takes to become a good project manager

The most common mistake people make in project management is assuming that it will be easy. It may be true that project management is easy when the project is simple, obvious, small, and low-risk. But in others it is terribly hard. When a project is hard, people close to it feel like failures. They feel like they didn't do a good job. They feel like they didn't deserve the success. There's a high incidence of depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide among project managers. Project management is hard not because people are bad at it. It is hard because it is not easy.

Project management is hard because it requires making decisions that are hard. It requires that you take decisions over an uncertain future. It requires that you make tradeoffs in an uncertain world. It requires that you confront the uncertainties. Project management is hard because it requires that you make decisions that are not easy. It requires that you ignore or downplay the things that are easy to ignore or downplay. It requires you to make hard decisions. Best way to become good is to use online project management software tools in all projects, develop a trend and maximize on productivity.

Project management is hard because it is not about people. It is not about technology. It is not even about work. It is about hard decisions. Project management is hard because, ultimately, it is about why you started the project in the first place. The first thing to understand about project management is that it's not a skill. It is a mindset. And a mindset is something you are born with.

Project management is a complex skill that can be learned. But it's also one whose value is hard to quantify.

Project management is very simple, but difficult to do well. The essence of project management is that you have a bunch of things to be done, and someone you want those things done by. The project manager implements a plan designed to maximize the chance of having those things done by someone who will do them right. The project manager knows, for example, that hiring a decent carpenter will be cheaper than hiring a bad one, but hiring a mediocre carpenter will be worse than hiring a bad one. The project manager also knows that if two different projects have the same budget, the better project manager will get more work done in less time.

The project manager also knows, for example, that sending five extra people to a construction project will make the project more reliable. But sending one extra person to the construction project will make the project more reliable, too. The project manager knows, in other words, that there's no free lunch. Trying to save a dollar on a project by hiring cheap labor or skimping on materials not only reduces the project's value, but makes the project manager's job harder.

The project manager also knows, for example, that sending five extra people to a construction project will make the project more reliable. But sending one extra person to the construction project will make the project more reliable, too. The project manager knows, in other words, that there's no free lunch. Trying to save a dollar on a project by hiring cheap labor or skimping on materials not only reduces the project's value, but makes the project manager's job harder.

The project manager has to make many decisions like that. The project manager needs to know how to do research. The project manager needs to know how to find good contractors. The second thing to understand about project management is that there are important PMS tools to help you become good at it. There is just project management. The third thing to understand about project management is that it is hard. The fourth thing to understand about project management is that every project manager makes mistakes. The fifth thing to understand about project management is that you can't do anything about mistakes. The sixth thing to understand about project management is that every successful project manager has a number of them