Datasheet

Key Project Management Skills
11
The four cornerstone skills, known as “soft” skills, are the most important set of skills you
have as a project manager. And of the four, leadership is the foundation stone you’ll lay first.
If you aren’t good at leading, your project and your project team will likely suffer for it. Tech-
nical skills are important, but without a mastery of the soft skills, the technical skills aren’t a
lot of help. Think of it as having a set of stairs in a 20-story building. The trip to the top floor
is possible, but it’s a lot of hard work and you’ll likely lose team members along the way. An
elevator would make the journey a lot more pleasant.
Whether you believe soft skills are intertwined with our personalities and
styles or you believe they can be learned, it’s safe to say none of us knows
everything and there’s always opportunity to learn new information and add
a few new tips and tricks to your tool bag.
Mastering the four foundation skills is even more important today than it was in the past
because the field of project management has grown up within the organization. We’ll look at
how that’s happened next.
Project Management Maturity
As the project management profession has grown and matured, so has its place in the typical
organization. For example, in the early days of our careers, we wielded notebooks full of
spreadsheets, checklists, and documentation for each project we were assigned. The positions
we held were buried several layers deep in the organization—usually somewhere in the cus-
tomer service or information technology departments.
Today, many organizations take a much more holistic approach to project management.
Sure, we still have the spreadsheets and checklists, but project management has moved
from the tactical, buried eight levels deep in an obscure department to the strategic. Project
management offices (PMOs) have cropped up everywhere. The PMO is responsible for
the management of all the major projects within an organization (also known as portfolio
or program management), and its director often holds a high-level management position.
We’re even beginning to see “C” level job postings—Chief Project Management Officer—
to head up those PMOs.
Project management is no longer a matter of how to take a project from step 1 to step 10—
although the tactical aspects will never go away. Project management has now taken a seat at
the executive table. Today project management is strategic as well as tactical. Where once an
organization may have decided to implement a technology product to improve workforce effi-
ciency, for example, that same project is now examined from the perspective of the overall
value it adds to the organization. It’s weighed against the strategic direction of the organiza-
tion and other projects of similar importance. Return on investment is investigated, as is the
value to the customer or end user. Global business implications are determined. And the list
goes on. The factors today are considered from an organizational perspective rather than a
departmental perspective.
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