Tips for Project managers in businesses

Want to succeed? Hire the right people

A successful employer needs more than a clever product. It needs a market that wants it. And it needs employees that know how to make it. So, in hiring, employers often fall back on stereotypes: energetic, enthusiastic people, or those who show initiative, or those who seem logical, or those who seem creative. Unfortunately, these stereotypes often end up selecting for the wrong things. If you hire enthusiastic people, you will end up with too many. If you hire logical people, you will end up with those who can't communicate, or those who can't solve real problems, or those who can't pay the rent. But if you hire initiative, or creativity, or communication, these will be skills that set you apart from the competition. That is how hiring should work. But in practice, it usually doesn't. The conventional way to get hired is to have qualifications. Qualifications are partly what you need to do the job and partly what the employer thinks you need. But employers often express qualifications in the wrong way. The want a competence, but they mean a competence that they have already: competence in systems they have spent years understanding. They want a competence, but they mean a competence they want you to have. Employers want people who are smart or smart-looking or nice or likeable or hard-working. But these are skills, not qualifications. Skills are things you can teach. Qualifications are things you can't teach. To hire well you have to think like an employer. You have to think about what the employer really wants, not what the employer thinks is important. You have to think about what skills the employer wants, not the skills you think will help. You may need tools and that is where employee project management software comes in. Lucky for you, Finclock team has developed cool software for you and you may try it for free.

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Simplify Project Management and focus on results

When I see the words "project management" on a job post, I know two things: the job is boring and the person hiring it has no idea what they are doing. The job has two main tasks: 1. Figure out what needs doing. 2. Get the other people who need to be doing it to do it.

The trouble with the first is that most organizations have no way of figuring out what needs doing. They are, in effect, run by giant collections of people who don't know what they're doing. In any organization, the people who run things (the executives) have information the other people don't have. So they try to figure out what they need to know, and they try to give it to them. But they can't. The trouble with the second is that, even if you could get the people who need to be doing something to do it, they might not do it. Or they might not do it in the way that you wanted them to. Or they might do it partially, leaving some problem unsolved. Or they might do it out of order. Or they might do it in a way that makes no sense. Or they might not do it at all.

If you try to have somebody figure out what needs doing, and somebody else figure out who needs to be doing it, and then somebody else figure out how to get them to do it, things will go wrong. But if you try to have somebody figure out what needs doing, and then somebody else figure out how to get them to do it, and then somebody else figure out who needs to be doing it, and then somebody else figure out how to get them to do it, things will go wrong. No matter how many people you have, you can't avoid risk. The trouble with the first task (figuring out what needs doing) is that, even if you could figure out what needs doing, you might not know which of your needs are important. You might have thousands of needs, but you don't know which ones are most important. Using online project management software would help you focus on the right things in your project and avoid excessive paperwork. So, just use the right software and focus on results.

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