How to Improve Your Project Management Skills
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How do employees and team members know what to do? Does every team member talk to the client and develop a plan for what they’re going to do? Is it free for all? You should hope not.
A project manager is responsible for keeping projects ticking along. They’re also responsible for setting goals and project plans.
In this article, we’ll cover the important skills needed to be a project manager and how to develop those skills.
What Skills Are Needed for Project Management?
Project managers are responsible for organizing, planning, and overseeing projects from inception to completion. This includes:
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Checking how projects are going
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Procuring needed resources
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Assigning tasks to team members
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Setting the scope of the project
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Assuring quality
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Interfacing with clients
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Managing deadlines and time usage
As you can tell, project managers take care of a lot of important tasks. A skilled project manager will be able to maintain clients’ expectations, assign tasks to the correct people, and set appropriate deadlines, all while maintaining close communication with clients and team members.
There are several soft and hard skills needed to be a stellar project manager. In this article, we’ve highlighted some of the skills you should practice.
If you’re ready to get on the fast track to a career in project management, we offer a self-paced, online Google Project Management certificate program. In this course, you'll learn in-demand skills at your own pace, no degree or experience required.
Related Articles: What Does A Project Manager Do?
Clear Communication
Communication skills are important for anyone in a managerial position. Whether you’re leading a team of four or a department of 150, knowing how to communicate well will make your job a lot easier.
Wordy or circular language is hard to understand and even harder to create action steps from. Project managers should be effective communicators. That means cutting out the fat and synthesizing messages to the bare minimum.
Without clear communication, a project manager can expect projects to take longer than they should, and team members to get flustered.
Organization
Overseeing every aspect of multiple projects from start to finish requires pristine organizational skills. Most projects will involve people from different departments working on various tasks throughout the project.
A project manager should be able to effectively organize projects logically and assign tasks appropriately. They’ll also need to stay organized on the lifecycle of projects and when to check-in. Because project managers will be walking multiple projects through completion, it’s important for them to stay on top of tasks by staying organized.
Delegation
To see a project to completion, a project manager needs to be able to delegate responsibilities properly. This means they’ll need to understand what department does what and who would be the best person for the job.
It’s not as easy as that though. Project managers need to understand their team members’ bandwidth and calendars. They’ll have to take care of their team members to ensure no one gets swamped or overwhelmed.
Critical Thinking
Project managers don’t just assign tasks and check-in. They create roadmaps to kick off projects. This requires critical thinking skills.
Project managers need to be able to know and document all the tasks a project will need. They’ll need to be able to consider any roadblocks that may come up and the order of tasks.
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5 Ways To Improve Project Management Skills
Project management can be a fun, engaging, and fulfilling career. However, if you’re expecting to get into this field without prior training or experience, you likely won’t have much success.
These are the best ways to grow the skills that are important for project management.
1. Learn About Good Communication
Good communications are brief. It shares exactly what needs to be shared without any excess language. However, it’s also shared with the people who need it and is delivered in a proper tone.
Consider the tone and what is most important in the message, and exclude everything else. If you’re sending an email to ask a question, put it at the top of the email, don’t bury it under a preamble.
Improving communication skills is something that will have to happen over time. There’s no one thing you can do to instantly get better at it. You can always practice writing and ask for feedback to learn what good communication looks like.
Related REDC Course: Communication Strategies
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2. Take A Course On Organization
With the amount of YouTube videos and TV shows about organizing homes, office space, and even habits, it’s obvious that organization is not a natural skill for most people.
Everyone can learn how to organize. To do so, start small. Tidy up your desk and update your calendar. However, if you want to use your organizational skills to work in project management, you’ll need to increase your skills.
The Regional Economic Development Center (REDC) at Yavapai College offers a course on organizational skills. This course will teach you about setting goals, making plans, and staying organized to see those goals to completion.
3. Seek Feedback
While taking courses and practicing project management, always ask for feedback. Project managers are in the business of people. Without knowing how other people think you’re doing, you won’t know what areas you need to improve in.
The need for feedback includes every aspect of project management.
4. Practice Practice Practice
You can take all the courses you want, there will always be unforeseen roadblocks in every project. Being able to foresee potential issues and building a project around those is a great skill to have, but how do you develop that? Practice.
There are two ways you can exercise your project management skills:
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Practice: If you’re able to take on minor project management skills at work or other environments, do it! Set dates, assign tasks, and use tools to follow the project to completion.
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Shadow: Find a successful project manager and learn from them. This is one of the best ways to learn about project management. While shadowing you should ask about what their day typically looks like and how they approach projects. It will take a while before you’re able to foresee and plan for roadblocks. However, the more you experience it, the better you’ll get.
5. Get Personal
Project managers are responsible for delegating tasks and making sure their team isn’t drowning in tasks. If you want to get better at project management, learn more about your team.
If you want to get used to managing people, talk to them. Get to know what they do for the team, how they do it, and what their calendar looks like. If you’re actively working as a project manager, Set up a tool or find software so you can easily see how busy your team members are.
Prepare For Your Career At REDC
Whether you’re looking to start a career in project management or a different career, the REDC at Yavapai College offers resources to upskill and find career opportunities.
Online courses let you learn independently or within an online class setting, and career resources like job fairs set you up for finding the job that’s right for you.