admin Just like cogs in a wheel, specialists in an efficient organization, do all their bit to churn out product and service. Outside a company’s routine operations there are some monumental tasks that invite their own kind of expert: the project manager.
The person who coordinates a team to complete a goal in a given time period is a project manager. Such projects may be outside of an organization’s routine, complicated and long term, or involving the coordination of multiple teams.
If this sounds like a regular old boss, mark that while a boss has hired, firing and mentoring capacities, a project manager has no such authority. Well, the principal difference is that a project manager is only short term.
Because the project, by definition, ends, the relationship is temporary. A project manager’s task is finite, while ordinary bosses oversee ongoing operations or manufacturing.
Bits of Advice for Project Management
The process of project management should not be more dispiriting than the project itself. Project management experts have some important steps to keep in mind for anyone with a goal that needs tackling, whether you have decided on hiring a contractor or not.
- Look for Domain Experience
Don’t expect a specialist in your field when considering a freelance project manager.
The job of the project manager is to draw upon and coordinate with the specialists.
Considering project managers, not for their expertise, but for their domain experience is what employers can do. The areas where the project managers managed, whether it’s search engine optimization or skyscraper construction refers to “Domain”. Still, the project manager may not hold the answers and for that, you will have to hire a consultant, but they will know the steps in the process.
Good project managers know the limitations of their technical knowledge and how to ask the right questions. The greater the domain experience of the project manager, the better they are able to know which questions to ask.
2.Soft Skills Prioritization
For what the project manager is really there is their leadership ability. However, the domain knowledge is still secondary.
The soft skills are far more important. Out of every team member, the project manager must be able to coax the best performance. They may require to function as a coach, helping everyone work together. They will also require to have some tough conversations, with both the team members and the stakeholders. All this involves soft skills.
Though the job does not technically require it with this specific skill balance, more and more project managers are choosing to get a certification. Among those in the field, its value is debatable.
However, certification doesn’t always mean high performance, when contracting a project manager.
3. Creation of Project Charter
One hopefully, already knows why they are undertaking a project. Even then it is good to lay out your goals in coordination with the project manager. Often this is referred to as the project charter.
Not always a charter may be formally written up, but clients and project managers should at least answer the following questions:
- Why are we executing this?
- What are our goals?
- What are our high-level objectives?
- What is our definition of “done”?
Two advantages of including the project manager in this process exist. They’ll have a better idea of what kind of expectations are realistic.
However, more importantly, both parties have the same definition of success.
It is important to get to the heart of why we are doing this project, in order to understand what the goals ought to be.
4. Set Deliverables
Specific metrics must be set to track progress once goals are outlined in the project charter.
These metrics are referred to as deliverables, or the quantifiable goods or services to be completed in project management. It may be a tangible milestone toward completing a goal or this may align exactly with the goal (e.g., “build the house”)
Either way, these must be settled in advance, but especially in the latter case where there are more variables to consider.
Project managers should get as much agreement as possible upfront about what the deliverables will be and when they will be complete. Communication is so incredibly important throughout the entire project, that it starts right from the beginning.
5. Project Performance Evaluation.
When a goal is completed, it can be easy to skip this final step.
Projects just get done, and everyone moves on to the next one, maybe with a cursory evaluation a few months later.
However, evaluation is vital for any chance of future improvement. This can also be split up into two stages. The first is more meta – how did the project itself go? What worked and what did not? These analyses prove to be helpful for not just the project manager but the client as well, particularly if they are going to be taking on anything similar in the future.
A review of the deliverables is the next evaluation.
Whether the goal of the project has increased customer satisfaction, shortened production times in a factory, or bringing a hot new product to the market, one will be measuring how much something has changed.
The second evaluation for that reason may be weeks or even months later, which is why it can be easy to forget this step. But do not as you will want to know if the whole project was worth it.
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