Now that you understand the characteristics and constraints facing a typical project, it’s time to think about how you will actually manage the work! My brother just started a company and needs to build out a couple of desk areas in their office. Ultimately, you’ll gain the respect of your team, your management, and your customer and they’ll trust your decision-making. What makes a Project Manager a good Project Manager? What is it that makes a good Project Manager tick?
We fear we’ll lose favor. Projects are ended when the goals are accomplished or when the goals are not achieved. With the right organizational skills, a PMO can remain in control of the project and ensure that no resources are being wasted or misused. Projects exist in every type of human enterprise.
PMOs today have great insight into the cost and progress of a particular project. Since you are in the most visible position on the project, it’s absolutely critical that both your delivery team and the customer see you doing what you say you are going to do.
Unleash The Gratitude Towards Your Coworkers! Instead, I had to spring it on them late and was never able to regain their trust.
June 11, 2008, Characteristics Of Project Management Managing Partner, Senior Portfolio Advisor, Sales The practice of PM has moved from focusing in the early years on planning and controlling the execution of projects to include presently the conceptual phases, and project portfolio management (discussed later) provides the needed linkage between strategic growth management of the organization and PM.
Passion for success and reaching goals tends to rub off on others…imagine a whole project team with a decent amount of passion toward succeeding for the company and the customer. Copyright 2020 PMTips.net All rights reserved. So if you accomplish something notable on the project that is helping the overall effort…go ahead and take the credit. Skilled technical resources will never look up to their Project Manager as a competent leader if they sense they are weak, wishy-washy in their decision-making, or simply lack the knowledge to ‘pull it off.’. Thinking Portfolio makes prioritisation easier and more transparent for the Municipality of Westland, Download Updated Thinking Portfolio Case Studies E-book, Thinking Portfolio helps Erasmus University to direct digitisation through Portfolio Management, Through Thinking Portfolio the central IT-organisation of the UMC Utrecht has a better grip on projects and ideas, Thinking Portfolio offers the Province of North Holland support from idea phase to project completion. A “business change manager” is sometimes appointed with responsibility for realizing the project benefits.
The second part of that phrase really has an entirely different meaning.
The opportunities and teams of the project are also for a temporary duration.
Oddly enough, in my daily life at home, organization skills are not my strong point. Develop a reputation for staying on track and managing your projects tightly.
As the PM, the project is yours. An example of this movement is provided by Fern (1999) in his book Time-to Profit Project Management, which emphasizes that the goal of new commercial product development PM is not simply to launch a new product, but to achieve a profit with that product in the marketplace.
to get the answers, support, or software fixes delivered in a timely manner to keep the project running smoothly.
It’s your neck on the line and your managing all aspects of it.
and it plays out the same on our projects. The best way to approach it is to realize that the customer and their project team are really just an extension of your project team. More elaborately, a project has a number of life cycle phases, the simplest definition of which includes concept, definition, execution, and closeout phases. In this case, stubbornness is definitely a good thing. This can be considered as a post-completion project phase, perhaps named “project results integration” or “project benefits realization.” If the project has been executed under contract for an external customer, then the primary benefit will be whatever financial profit has been realized under the contract, plus of course the experience gained and the possibility of future business with that customer, or with other customers using the experience gained. Managing the Total Project Life Cycle: The primary (some say the only) difference between projects and an ongoing enterprise as something to be managed is that the project has a life cycle: it starts, is executed, and it ends. It is critical to stay focused, keep the original project goals and milestones in front of you and in front of everyone on both teams and stay the course. 7 Critical Steps To Project Crisis Management, Thinking Portfolio helps Vlaardingen improve its digital service. The ability to adapt to unique portfolio and project needs is a telltale sign of a good PMO. I thought that maybe I was done with this series, but I’ll probably truly never been done with it. In an ideal world, there would be no problems.
If the team does poorly, you’re the first one to pay for it.
Sometimes this is a tough sell to a customer who may believe that the work is really within the original scope of the project. If a project management solution is already used within your organization, start there. Finland, Esa Toivonen The problem-solving characteristic in a good Project Manager forces them to change their way of thinking based on a given situation – forces them to get creative. We never recovered from it and the project was lost. +358 40 706 4354 katri.harju(at)thinkingportfolio.com. Portfolio Management – Back to Basics Podcast – listen to all episodes! One project I was asked to jump on was going south fast. One thing I learned very early on working on contracts with the U.S. Department of Education is that you need to be open and honest with your customer. Tel. During implementation, there may be time on your project when you have to play the role of negotiator.
Projects are comprised of diverse tasks that require diverse specialist skills, and hence cut across the traditional functional organizational lines. This one probably applies to any profession and just about any role a person plays, but it’s often overlooked. By creating a stable and transparent line of communication between the technical team, managers, executives and stakeholders, a good PMO’s abilities are judged based on his/her capability of communicating clearly and honestly.
Project management is unique in that it uses both international and industry specific benchmarks. Regardless of the nature, size and urgency of a project, mistakes and problems are bound to emerge. Dr. Russell D. Archibald, PhD (Hon), MSc, Fellow PMI and APM/IPMA, PMP, is one of the six founding members of the Project Management Institute.
You’re in the same position as the manager of a major league baseball team or any team for that matter. They also must be ready to fight for their project, their customer, and/or their team members.
+358 40 733 6670 esa.toivonen(at)thinkingportfolio.com, Katri Harju
As I’ve discussed in previous articles, the formal communication alone on each project should involve a weekly team meeting, weekly Status Meeting with the customer, and a weekly Status Report to team members and the customer. On the flipside, as Project Managers – or for some, aspiring Project Managers – we also struggle with this concept as we try to analyze our own characteristics to see if we have what it takes to be a Project Manager.
The project is temporary with a certain starting & ending date. Tel. They are also knowledgeable in handling and allocating the right resources for the right projects. I like that you said a good project manager can stay on track and keep a tight project schedule.
In fact, you’ll probably never get the high-visibility, business-critical projects assigned to you. Every project faces issues.
The successful Project Manager will not be swayed, cannot be influenced by others into moving off the course he/she has been set upon in order to achieve the goals of the project.
At least then you show that it’s still important by not blowing it off and turn your work in late without an explanation. But in terms of Project Management, I tend to thrive on the need to keep all of these activities together, stay on task and keep a project team moving forward.
Organizational skills are critical for a PMO as they are responsible for scheduling and budgeting in the project. “Do what you say, and say what you do.” Let’s dissect the first part of that phrase first. Listening is always a good thing – and it’s a very important characteristic of a Project Manager. For the customer or purchaser of the project it is necessary to integrate the project results (new information system, new office building, new process plant, new product, for example) into the ongoing business operations. A weak PM will lose control of the team, the customer, the scope, and ultimately their job.
Key differentiating characteristics of PM when compared to functional organization management are: These responsibilities are fully described in current PM literature. Look for project managers that have PMI's Project Management Professional (PMP®) training, the project management profession's most respected and globally recognized certification credential.
Professional training. A PM with passion on a project means that PM is concerned for the effort, the budget, the timeline, the customer, the individual team members, and of course the final outcome. If I’m going to help with system testing and I’ll run through some test cases by Friday and have feedback ready then I need to do that and meet the critical deadlines. Characteristics of Project in Project Management. A customer will sense the weakness and either use that to take over control of the project or possibly request that the Project Manager be replaced. They struggle with it when they’re interviewing candidates and I’m sure they struggle with it the most when they weigh the candidates and try to come up with the one that they decide should become part of their organization. Therefore, it is almost never in any project’s best interest to keep the bad news from the customer. I definitely took that as a compliment because one of my biggest fears as a PM is that with so much communication happening between team members and between vendor and client I might miss communicating a critical piece of information. Remember, the rest of the project team also has their hand on the pulse of the project and at any given time may have more vital information than the PM to share including wise views on the direction…or re-direction…needed on the project.
The Project Manager is the central information repository for both project teams and many times the timeliness and thoroughness of his or her communication can be critical to the success of the current tasks and the project as a whole.