Project Management - the "must have" skill
What is it that produces a great manager? Is it the experience in a cut-throat sales environment? Is it having a technical background to really understand how the business ticks? Or is it a winning interpersonal style, that helps a manager achieve success?
Regardless of their background and formal training, managers in the current era must draw on their entire bag of skills in order to be effective. Increasingly, it is managers with a recognition and understanding of project management principles that are hotly sought after.
Some of us approach any assignment as a mini project. The smallest, seemingly insignificant of events can benefit from a project manager’s perspective.
Try applying project management discipline to your next work-related assignment. Start with the business case. The WHY of what you are about to embark upon. Make sure it stacks up. If the business case does not make a compelling argument to proceed, then don’t.
From the development of a sound business case, the scope of the job at hand should become clear. What is in and what is out. Document it for yourself or others so you don’t become distracted down the track. Once defined, do not change the scope of the project.
OK, so we know why we are going to proceed and we know what we need to focus on. Now we need to put some careful planning in to what we will deliver.
Key tangible deliverables will be required progressively during our project. Some will occur concurrently, others will follow a critical path where the project could stall in the absence of the deliverable. For example, an overhaul of employment contracts cannot be presented to staff until we have redesigned our policies and prepared our communication.
As part of our planning process we should also identify the key stakeholders in our project. We need to put ourselves in their shoes and try to anticipate how they will react at various stages. This process will also flush out potential risks to our project and help to build strategies to eliminate, or at least mitigate the risks.
Communication needs also become evident as we wear the different hats of our stakeholders. What do we need to communicate to each audience? When do we need to communicate? How? It may be as simple as organising a couple of meetings or as complex as full technical briefings to staff, industry and media. The scale of the project will determine the communication plan.
Let’s not lose sight of what has to get done and how. We need a budget and a work breakdown structure of who is doing what in order to achieve our clearly stated outcome.
Additional resources may be required and should be anticipated at the planning stage. Time, cost and human resources need to be realistically assessed. Many projects go off the rails because managers typically underestimate – sometimes by a huge margin.
The final outcome of our project might be a presentation to staff, report to the Board or roll out of a new computer system. It should be specific and measurable. We should review our results and mentally assess our own performance. Did we deliver on budget, on time and achieve our stated outcome?
Project Management is a multi-facetted science. Borrowing just some of the elements of this discipline can enhance our major managerial activities. Accountability increases and our performance becomes more focused leading to fewer project disasters.
