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September 3, 2007

Success Tips to Project Managers

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There are numerous ways to fail as a project manager. Many Project Managers just live with their job as project manager and don’t actually manage the projects. Many Project Managers simply don’t get time to get updated with latest technology tools and best practices. Let’s take a look at some of the ways in particular that project managers can succeed.

Use project management tools effectively
There are hundreds of project managing tools available today. Project management tools today can be of such enormous aid that they can mean the difference between a project succeeding or failing. Just to name a few for enterprise project management to personal project management- Microsoft Project, QualBridge Enterprise Project Manager, eProject, Wrike, Primavera, ProExecute, BaseCamp, OpenProj (Free and Open Source) and dotproject (.NET based free and 0pen source) are some of the very successful project management software tools.

Manage your time well
Speaking of time, first of all you personally should be organized and achieve the desired outcome on time and on budget, then your project team will follow you. Be an example.

Conduct meetings effectively
Meetings are necessary in completing projects - project planning meeting, stakeholder meetings, project team meeting, weekly briefing, daily scrum and so on. Focus on the agenda, prioritize the discussions and focus on output. You should become an effective meeting manager also to become a successful project manager.

Maintain a sense of humor
Activities in a project may go wrong. But you have to maintain a sense of humor so that you don’t do damage to your health, to your team, to your organization, and to the project itself. Sometimes, not always, the best response to a breakdown is to simply let out a good laugh. Take a walk, stretch, revitalize yourself, and then come back and figure out what you are going to do next. Identify your best time to solve critical problems. My brains work well in the early morning, what about you?

Give and receive criticism
Team is very delicate to deal. Giving effective criticism to team is not so easy. There is a greater chance to break a thin line of patience and your team members may get upset. So learning the emotions of each of the team members is very important. Similarly, the ability to receive criticism is crucial for project managers.

Improve decision-making skills
Decision-making is a skill that can be learned and improved. Since you can make decisions on time, you are chosen as project manager. You should be quick to give decisions and the decisions should be right, because your team members look to you
for some approvals, choices from many options and prioritize activities.

Be adaptive
You may not know everything. Team members, other project managers, and those who authorize the project to begin with can provide valuable input, including new directions and new procedures. Accept any good suggestions if adaptable with project time, budget and resources.

Trust yourself
There may arise the moments during project execution, when Project Managers lose their hope and confidence. It it continues longer, that surely make project fail. Trusting yourself and also team members is a vital component to effective project management.

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7 responses to "Success Tips to Project Managers"

# University Update - Open Source - Success Tips to Project Managers pingbacked on September 3rd, 2007:
[…] Success Tips to Project Managers » This Summary is from an article posted at Rajesh Shakya - Helping Technopreneurs to Excel and Lead […]
# Webee commented on September 3rd, 2007:
Thanks for wonderful tips.
# Debora commented on September 4th, 2007:
Rajesh, thanks for useful tips! I guess all of them are important, but for me a project always starts with the right tool. There are lots of PM tools, you mentioned some of them. In my case it’s Wrike. A proper tool will help you with all the other components, such as meetings, time management and being adaptive. I practice GTD in Wrike, it makes me a lot more productive.
The only this any tool won’t help you with is maintaining your sense of humor, I guess
# admin commented on September 4th, 2007:
@Webee
Thank you.

@Debora
Thank you for your comments. I have added Wrike in my PM tools list.

Rajesh
# Bruce P. Henry commented on September 10th, 2007:
An interesting “catch all” kind of post. I find that each of the subjects you mentioned seems to be worthy of a book.

I have found that the primary problem with most project management tools is that they require a single number for an effort estimate. That coupled with the tendency of these single-point guesses to be treated as promises pretty much make a person want to give up on estimating the effort and using tools altogether.

However I’ve found that if you always give estimates in ranges (e.g. 4-6 person weeks, 1-3 days, 6-9 staff months, etc) it is quite clear that it is an estimate, not a prediction. Giving a range opens up the discussion of what could happen (risks) that would push the effort towards the worst case end of the estimate or bring it in towards the best case end. But there are few (if any) tools that support this well.

Another nice thing about ranged estimates is that when you are asked to estimate something with poorly defined requirements you should give wide ranges to communicate the uncertainty. Well defined, believable requirements get estimates like 5-7 weeks whereas poorly defined, nebulous requirements get estimates like 4-20 weeks.

As a project manager there’s pretty much no way to get around gathering estimates. Your business needs some idea of the investment required to complete a project in order to make trade-offs. Also folks in other departments (e.g. marketing, operations, manufacturing,…) need some idea of when they are likely to take delivery of the project. A team that can accurately (not precisely) estimate these things gives their company a real competitive advantage.

Of course as your post points out, there is a lot more to project management that just the tools.
# Adam Donnison commented on November 5th, 2007:
You mention that dotProject is .NET based. It isn’t. It is web-based written in PHP. The reason many people think it is .NET based is because at the time we set up the domain, only dotproject.net was available.
# admin commented on November 5th, 2007:
Hi Adam,
Thank you for the correction about dotproject.net development platform.

Rajesh