6 Essential Project Management Skills For Achieving Professional Success

Being a successful project manager requires more than just earning relevant qualifications and undergoing real-time training.

Project management includes a cycle of stages- delegating a project to your preferred team, setting goals to be acquired, determining a budget and defining a timeline to deliver the project.

Are you curious to know how you can do it all?

Read on to find out the different roles that you are expected to play as a project management professional and the vital skills of a project manager that you need to master to become a future leader!

Why Is Project Management Important?

Project management is a fairly straightforward career path that may hold you accountable for tasks that are far more than just keeping track of the ongoing projects.

Having an effective project management department in place can allow businesses to keep all aspects of their projects organised. This can be done by implementing a few steps- initiation, planning, executing, monitoring and closing of a project.

What Does A Project Manager Do?

Being a good project manager is not simply about delivering classic responsibilities and duties on time but getting the most out of a team to keep things running smoothly and creating harmonious relationships across departments.

Let’s dive into the responsibilities of a project manager that need to be executed regularly.

• Mapping out timelines
• Assessing project opportunities and risks
• Creating, allocating and managing the budget
• Analysing each phase of the project life cycle
• Planning projects from conception to implementation
• Troubleshooting challenges and problems
• Communicating project updates with all stakeholders
• Maintaining and delivering the end service or product

What Are The Essential Project Management Skills?

1. Communication

Everyone in the project management division must be able to effectively convey their ideas, vision, goals and issues to produce winning reports and presentations.

As the majority of a project managers’ time is spent communicating, you need to learn how to foster collaboration. This can be via file sharing or verbal communication with vendors, customers, stakeholders and contractors, by leveraging appropriate reporting tools and systems in place.

2. Leadership

Holding a managerial position requires you to acquire highly developed leadership skills and techniques, enabling you to take a project through tough times to its successful completion.

Additionally, you may want to demonstrate your mediating and motivating capabilities to relate with your team members through empathy and communicate the project goals effectively.

3. Team management

As a project manager, you are expected to manage from both an operational point of view, as well as lead your team from a strategic perspective.

From creating, assigning and managing every element of the project, you must also be able to resolve conflicts and evaluate performance to promote teamwork. It is also important to be a source of inspiration to your team.

4. Negotiation

Project managers are expected to have strong negotiating skills to make the best use of resources, schedules and budgets.

This particular skill will make you better equipped to handle various types of unavoidable experiences, minimise any fallout and steer projects back on track to obtain the desired outcome.

5. Personal organisation

Getting your thought process in line is equally important as organising project commitments and setting up a realistic schedule to manage resources.

Developing personal organisation will allow you to manage projects easily and can help you understand the big picture of the everyday hard work that is being put into projects.

6. Risk management

This is an important technique to increase your chances of delivering projects successfully and navigate your way around risky environments commonly encountered within the project management sector.

Besides helping you to identify, assess and control risk, you will also become proficient at addressing unanticipated issues that may occur at any point.

How To Develop Project Management Skills?

There are several ways that you can develop essential project management skills and thrive in a career as a project manager.

Let’s check out a few of them.

• Expanding your horizons and refining your skills by reading blogs and books related to project management
• Undergoing a project management course from a reputable organisation that can provide you with real-time training
• Joining an international project management organisation as a member to network with like-minded professionals and learn to use relevant tools and resources effectively
• Familiarise yourself with the high performing and in-demand project management software to gain professional expertise.

Do you want to enhance your skillset and become more productive when it comes to managing tasks related to your projects?

Start honing all the aforementioned skills to strengthen your project management abilities by applying to the postgraduate certificate programme offered at the London School of Business and Finance (LSBF), now!

This article was written by Deblina Dam. Edited by Olly Cox.