You found our list of essential project management skills.
Project management skills are necessary abilities to plan and carry out a project. Examples include communication, leadership, and risk management. Project managers often have a group of individuals working under their direction, and the group must coordinate their efforts to meet the project’s objectives.
These competencies are a subset of management skills. Project leads can also benefit from project management tools and books on project management.
This article contains:
- project management skills for students
- project management technical skills
- project management hard skills
- project management soft skills
- agile project management skills
Let’s get started!
List of project management soft skills
Non-technical skills, or “soft skills,” are abilities that may increase the quality of your job without the need for any specialized equipment or training. Soft skills are also known as “people skills” or “interpersonal skills,” and they come in handy while interacting with coworkers. You will need the following soft skills for a successful project management career.
1. Leadership skills
Leadership is the single most crucial skill for every prospective project manager. You may lead and inspire your team with different leadership styles, each with strengths and weaknesses. An efficient leader knows when to delegate responsibility to subordinates and when to step in and take charge. Even if you do not consider yourself a leader, your team will still turn to you as the project manager for direction.
A project manager should recognize the distinction between management and leadership. The management adheres to standard operating procedures and project management practices and ensures every team member complies. However, leadership requires technical and interpersonal abilities. A project leader must be able to motivate and inspire every member working on the project. Taking a compassionate and analytical stance can help you grow as a leader. Influential leaders unite their teams and make them feel safe enough to work together.
Read about leadership skills
2. Collaboration
Successful project management rests on the back of teamwork. Collaboration is key to effective project management because it allows efficient and accurate task completion. When working on a project with other groups, you might get perspectives you would not get working alone. Incorporating extra brainpower into a project always results in better ideas and more thorough planning.
You can hone collaboration competency through communication. For example, use active listening methods to keep your mind and attention on the speaker at all times. Learning to share ideas freely, break down barriers, and work together effectively are all skills essential to any effective collaborative team.
Read more about collaboration.
3. Teamwork
Your team’s combined efforts will be more successful than the individual results of any single team member. Working together makes every team member feel included, respected, and encouraged to do their best. The best way to improve your cooperation abilities is to engage in team brainstorming, encourage one-on-one interactions, and seek feedback from your colleagues. In addition, it would be best if you kept an eye out for any member who has not been contributing and encouraged fresh ideas from others on the team.
Here is a list of books on teamwork.
4. Communication
Miscommunication sometimes occurs in group settings. Projects will be smoother and more fun if team members learn to communicate well and avoid common pitfalls. To develop your communication skills, you should practice being forthright and truthful with your colleagues. As a team, you will need to trust each other. Establishing this confidence requires that you indulge all ideas, including those you strongly disagree with, from your team members during the conversation.
Check out these lists of communication books and communication activities.
5. Time Management
Time management and organization skills intersect. As you become better at prioritizing and arranging your work, you will have a more accurate picture of what you have to do and how long it will take. Getting to business and focusing on pending tasks is not always easy. Establishing priorities might help you avoid procrastination and get tasks done faster. Knowing which chores are most important, you may focus on them first and avoid dropping the ball.
Here is a list of books on time management.
6. Organization
Many project managers find organizational abilities the most daunting soft skill required for success. It is easy to mistake organization for a trait you possess or lack. The best way to improve your organizational skills is to establish and maintain a central, reliable resource for all of your projects. Disconnected work makes causes sloppiness. According to a study, the typical worker uses ten programs in a single workday. You can use a digital organizing tool as your team’s one source of truth instead of ten separate programs.
7. Solution-focused Thinking
Focus on the results makes problem solvers successful. Solving problems well does not require having the “correct” answer every time. The problem-solving skill requires you to be able to look at issues from several angles and systematically work toward a resolution. Solution-focused thinking is one of the most important project management skills for students.
Regular analyses and decision-making frameworks based on data are advisable to improve your problem-solving skills. If, for instance, you want to increase sales by 15 percent compared to the competition, you may do a competitive study to see where you stand. Then, you can use the data garnered to increase sales. For this situation, you and your sales staff may work together to create a brand-new marketing plan.
Here is a list of problem-solving activities.
8. Critical Thinking
You can train yourself to think through matters rationally or logically rather than react emotionally. The best critical thinkers train themselves to examine the evidence at hand and draw their own conclusions based on the data.
Improving your critical thinking skills requires asking how and why you make certain conclusions, exploring alternative solutions, and finding out what data guides your choices. Critical thinking skills are a great way to ensure you are coming at matters with an objective perspective.
9. Flexibility
When working on projects, you may expect to make adjustments to some of your initial assumptions. In addition, you may have had to make some changes to your process because of a modification in your timeline or priorities. The best project managers can quickly adjust course to keep their team moving in the correct path.
Learning when and how to pivot is the key to adaptability. Self-awareness is essential for this skill. Having a better understanding of and control over your emotions, which are often in a state of flux during times of transition, is greatly facilitated by developing other soft skills, such as self-awareness and mindfulness.
10. Conflict Resolution
All the initiatives you oversee will have some degree of contention. In some instances, it may be necessary to revise the project’s scope to accommodate the needs of all parties involved. Perhaps you overspent or failed to meet a deadline. Conflict resolution aims to ensure that all parties involved feel like their opinions matter. Assuming there have been victims, it is important to hear them out and negotiate a compromise. If no perfect solution exists, then addressing the discussion with patience and empathy may help defuse a potentially unpleasant situation and lead to a better outcome.
Here is a list of conflict resolution activities.
List of project management hard skills
Hard skills, in contrast to soft skills, are quantifiable. These hard skills are directly related to project management. Improving these skills will make you a more capable project manager overall. The following are critical hard skills that every successful project manager should have.
1. Planning
The foundation of each successful project is a well-thought-out plan, sometimes known as a “project charter.” You may expect the following components to be in each project plan:
- Project goals and objectives
- Success indicators
- Stakeholders and Functions
- Budget
- Project scope
- Deliverables, milestones, and dependencies
- Scheduling and timeline
- Communication channels
Your project’s brief or road plan may already include some of these aspects, such as your objectives and major milestones. Your project plan, however, is where these disparate parts of your job join together to form a whole.
2. Scoping
The project scope includes the size, objectives, and constraints, such as timeline and money. Progress and possibilities entirely depend on the scope of your project and the accompanying budget. If you do not take the time to define your project’s scope at the outset clearly, you may find that your final deliverables end up being far broader than originally planned.
Setting project scope early and regularly will help you become more proficient. Once you have settled on the parameters of your project, it is important to ensure that every stakeholder is aware of and understands them. In addition, you can refer to the project scope so you may confidently decline requests in the future.
3. Kickoff Execution
A launch meeting is necessary to get every stakeholder on the same page for the project. At this point, it is a good idea to go through the project’s intended outcomes and deliverables and distribute relevant papers such as a project brief, a project roadmap, a bill of materials for a marketing campaign, or a creative brief for a design team.
If your launch meeting goes well, you should plan on giving the stakeholders the materials you have compiled. The next step is to have a Q&A or brainstorming session to ensure every team member understands the project’s scope, timeline, cost, and deliverables.
4. Road-Mapping
In project management, a roadmap is a high-level plan outlining a project’s significant milestones and expected completion timeframe. If you are working on a large, complicated project with many different stakeholders involved, then a project plan can help individuals get on the same page immediately.
Created with Gantt chart-like software, project roadmaps set out your whole project’s timeline in a horizontal bar chart format. You can use a tool like Asana’s Timeline to sketch up a rough timeline for your project, then fill in significant milestones and dependencies.
5. Scheduling
A project timeline is a schedule of when events need to happen and for how long. A well-defined timeframe allows you to monitor the success of a project and provide necessary assets on time. To build a timeline, start by defining when you want your project to begin and end and any main milestones along the way. Then, as you develop your project’s tasks and deliverables, establish deadlines and dependencies between them.
6. Brief Documentation
The project brief is a document that lays out the big picture of your project and how you intend to get there. Planning sessions might use this document as a guide. You should note that your project brief is an ever-evolving document. You may revise and update your project brief as needed throughout creating your project plan and incorporating feedback from stakeholders. The brief should include a link to your project plan if you have one, a list of project stakeholders and their duties, any other relevant paperwork or files, and any other high-level information your team may require.
7. Task Management
Once your project has officially begun, task management skills deal with efficiently handling team time. The best project managers can help their teams prioritize and complete tasks since they can see what they are working on in real-time.
However, you do not have to have a sixth sense of your project’s status. Instead, you may utilize software to organize your tasks. Software for managing tasks is helpful because it allows you to see the whole picture of your project’s progress rather than just the tasks that require completion. If you can get your team to work together more efficiently and effectively, then you have good task management.
Here is a list of task management software.
8. Forecasting
Any competent project manager must be proficient in this aspect of business management. Having a project manager who lacks knowledge of project management techniques and forecasting is impossible. Forecasting is essential for a project manager’s regular activities, including arranging and prioritizing work, keeping tabs on progress, and making situation-specific judgments.
Cost management is another essential ability that ties in to forecasting. Budgetary restrictions apply to every project. With careful preparation, you may avoid costly mistakes and unexpected setbacks to your project timeline and budget.
List of project management technical skills
Technical skills relate to how well-versed you are in various applications and programs when discussing project management. The tools used in contemporary project management are intuitive and simple to grasp. You should learn these skills to use them effectively in your project management jobs.
According to a recent assessment by the Project Managerial Institute, a project manager’s chances of project success rise by 40 percent if they have the appropriate blend of technical and management abilities.
1. Expertise in Project Management Software
When it comes to managing projects, software has gone a long way from the days of complicated, expert-level solutions. However, it takes time to learn and master the program you chose, even if it is simple to use. You can check to see if there is a manual or videos that can walk you through the tool’s features and functions. Examples include Asana, Slack, Wrike, and Trello.
2. Gantt Charts
Gantt charts allow you to see your project as a horizontal bar chart, with each bar representing an activity and its duration represented by the bar’s length. The chart contains:
- Dependencies
- Project Milestones
- Project updates in real-time
- Start and end dates
Since traditional Gantt chart technology may be difficult to use and has a restricted scope, Timeline from Asana is a Gantt-chart-like tool that offers the same functions.
3. Kanban Boards
The Kanban board is another common visual project management. The different columns on a Kanban board include New, In Progress, and Completed. Cards, which indicate tasks, move horizontally across the grid until all of the columns are empty.
Lean project management teams, such as those working on products, engineering, or software development, often find success using Kanban boards or similar visual project management tools. Kanban boards are an Agile methodology that emphasizes flexibility and adaptability to meet changing requirements for software development in real time.
4. Agile Management
Agile management is a lean project management technique popular in the product, engineering, and software development sectors. Agile revolves around a process of iterative development and incremental improvement. Agile also incorporates several lean approaches, such as lean portfolio management, Scrum, and Kanban.
The project manager’s role in an Agile team is to facilitate communication among team members and maintain a flexible mindset. The project timeline may need adjustment, or the teams may need to coordinate with others working on a separate project or even keep in contact often. Agile project management skills are critical to the project’s success.
5. Workloads Management
Anyone who has managed a project knows how difficult it can be to determine who is responsible for each task. You can evaluate your team’s capacity via workload management to prevent over- or underutilization of their skills. A competent project manager would constantly check their team’s workload to ensure no one is burning out since this is an iterative process with no clear starting or ending point.
Workload management software involves a two-stage process. The first stage is determining your team’s available resources, skill sets, and current workload. Then, you can allocate resources to tasks depending on individual workloads or make adjustments as necessary.
6. Cost Management
When planning a project, it is important to keep an eye on the budget and make adjustments as necessary. Successful projects need managers who have mastered the art of cost management. Cost management is essential to complete a project on time and under budget.
Good project managers set a clear budget and cost baseline from the project’s inception. Every stakeholder in the project has a firm grasp of the financial plan. Then, keep the project’s budget and costs in mind while work progresses. You should ensure you are not going over your budget by regularly checking in on your expenditures during the project. After the project, compare the actual cost to the estimated cost to see how well your cost control techniques worked.
Conclusion
It may seem daunting to have to master all project management skills. Some methodologies, such as Agile, are only applicable to select groups. However, the right mindset and tools can make skills like organization seem effortless. Mastering project management requires practice. Rather than aiming to master every skill at once, try to hone in on mastering one or two specific skills for each project. For instance, learning a new visual method of project management like Kanban or writing your first project plan.
Next, check out these lists of employee management software and online collaboration tools.
Grace He