How to Become the Project Manager Who Delivers Quality Results On Time

A busi­ness process com­bines many dif­fer­ent projects to be han­dled at a time. Nei­ther the busi­ness owner nor all employ­ees are capa­ble to han­dle these projects pru­dently. A project man­ager is a pro­fes­sional who is trained and expert in han­dling these projects and directs them towards their desired goals.

A high-quality project man­ager is the one who clearly under­stands the com­pany and project goals and is able to make and exe­cute plans for the real­iza­tion of these goals.

Char­ac­ter­is­tics of an excel­lent project manager

A project man­ager is con­sid­ered suit­able for lead­ing a project if he pos­sesses the fol­low­ing characteristics:

• He must pos­sess con­cep­tual think­ing and should be com­pe­tent to under­stand sys­tems the­ory and the style in which the spec­u­la­tions can be prac­ti­cally applied to ana­lyze and design infor­ma­tion sys­tem for the com­ple­tion of project.
• Infor­ma­tion acquir­ing ana­lyt­i­cal think­ing and inter­per­sonal awareness
• Impact antic­i­pa­tion and good com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills
• Mon­i­tor­ing and con­trol­ling skills
• Busi­ness aware­ness and busi­ness part­ner ori­en­ta­tion expertise
• Qual­ity main­te­nance and orga­ni­za­tional aware­ness skills
• He should be capa­ble to resource­fully apply influ­ence and moti­vat­ing fac­tors to accom­plish the project goals.
• Devel­op­ing of self-confidence in his team mem­bers is an impor­tant skill a project man­ager should possess.
• Stress man­age­ment skills
• He should be con­cerned for appro­pri­ate cred­i­bil­ity and should be flex­i­ble enough to adjust to unex­pected envi­ron­men­tal changes.

Though all the above char­ac­ter­is­tics are acquired by a project man­ager through hard work and expe­ri­ence but, the con­cep­tual think­ing skill is an indi­vid­ual quality.

Lead­er­ship styles fol­lowed by a project manager

Three diverse lead­er­ship styles are usu­ally seen among the project managers:

• The first type of leader is the one who has lit­tle faith in the capa­bil­i­ties of his team and han­dles every­thing by him­self. He is an over­loaded per­son and many fail to achieve timely goals.
• The sec­ond type of leader del­e­gates all the nec­es­sary tasks to his sub­or­di­nates. Such a leader may fail to ana­lyze mis­takes at an appro­pri­ate time and there­fore may fail later.
• The third lead­er­ship style is a blend of above men­tioned two styles. Such a leader del­e­gates tasks but super­vises his sub­or­di­nates closely. He is famil­iar with the meth­ods and involves every­one in achieve­ment of the goals.

All these styles can be accu­rately fol­lowed depend­ing on one’s own comfort.

Key roles of a project manager

The basic func­tions per­formed by all project man­agers are:

• He is required to give utmost atten­tion to the achieve­ment of project goals. A good project leader keeps the project goals in line with busi­ness goals. His plan­ning and work­ing meth­ods relates to these goals.
• The sec­ond key func­tion per­formed by a project man­ager is giv­ing keen atten­tion to all the project details.  A col­lec­tion of small steps and processes lead to the com­ple­tion of entire project. There­fore, keep­ing an eye for details on all these steps is important.
• An intel­lec­tual project man­ager is required to give impor­tance to clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion and effi­cient team coor­di­na­tion. To accom­plish this func­tion, a project man­ager should pos­sess good ver­bal and non ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills.
• All the project man­agers irre­spec­tive of the type of project they are occu­pied in must be ready to incor­po­rate prob­lem solv­ing meth­ods in the pro­cess­ing of the project. He is also respon­si­ble to com­mu­ni­cate the project details to indi­vid­u­als other than his team.
• The last impor­tant role nec­es­sary to be per­formed is the super­vi­sion of cus­tomer rela­tion­ships. Main­te­nance of high qual­ity cus­tomer rela­tion­ship is a key to the suc­cess­ful attain­ment of project goals.

A project man­ager is required to give cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion the pri­mary impor­tance and con­tin­u­ously work towards its achievement.

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Kevin Edward

Kevin is a man­age­ment expert and he pens down use­ful tips on how busi­nesses can achieve their desired goals with proper plan­ning. He also writes about dif­fer­ent project man­age­ment courses that will help pro­fes­sion­als move up faster in com­pa­nies than their peers.

Lat­est posts by Kevin Edward (see all)

• How to Become the Project Man­ager Who Deliv­ers Qual­ity Results On Time — Novem­ber 19, 2012