In his book, “The Little Black Book of Project Management,” Michael Thomsett identifies his version of the skillset of a successful project manager. I’m providing it here to give you yet another take on some of the key characteristics and capabilities that go into being able to effectively manage an engagement and a team of highly skilled resources.
Mr. Thomsett’s version comes mainly from the viewpoint of a department manager being thrown into the project management role, so understand that this is assuming an experienced manager is handling the engagement, but not one well-versed in project management.
The Successful Project Manager
A successful project manager knows how to bring together the definition and control elements and operate them efficiently. That means you will need to apply the leadership skills you already apply in running a department and practice the organizational abilities you need to constantly look to the future.
In other words, if you’re a qualified department manager, you already possess the skills and attributes for succeeding as a project manager. The criteria by which you will be selected will be similar.
Chances are, the project you’re assigned will have a direct relationship to the skills you need just to do your job. For example:
- Organizational and leadership experience. An executive seeking a qualified project manager usually seeks someone who has already demonstrated the ability to organize work and to lead others. He or she assumes that you will succeed in a complicated long-term project primarily because you have already demonstrated the required skills and experience.
- Contact with needed resources. For projects that involve a lot of coordination between departments, divisions, or subsidiaries, top management will look for a project manager who already communicates outside of a single department. If you have the contacts required for a project, it will naturally be assumed that you are suited to run a project across departmental lines.
- Ability to coordinate a diverse resource pool. By itself, contact outside of your department may not be enough. You must also be able to work with a variety of people and departments, even when their backgrounds and disciplines are dissimilar. For example, as a capable project manager, you must be able to delegate and monitor work not only in areas familiar to your own department but in areas that are alien to your background.
- Communication and procedural skills. An effective project manager will be able to convey and receive information to and from a number of team members, even when particular points of view are different from his own. For example, a strictly administrative manager should understand the priorities of a sales department, or a customer service manager may need to understand what motivates a production crew.
- Ability to delegate and monitor work. Project managers need to delegate the work that will be performed by each team member and to monitor that work to stay on schedule and within budget. A contractor who builds a house has to understand the processes involved for work done by each subcontractor, even if the work is highly specialized. The same is true for every project manager. It’s not enough merely to assign someone else a task, complete with a schedule and a budget. Delegation and monitoring are effective only if you’re also able to supervise and assess progress.
- Dependability. Your dependability can be tested only in one way: by being given responsibility and the chance to come through. Once you gain the reputation as a manager who can and does respond as expected, you’re ready to take on a project.
These project management qualifications read like a list of evaluation points for every department manager. If you think of the process of running your department as a project of its own, then you already understand what it’s like to organize a project—the difference, of course, being that the project takes place in a finite time period, whereas your departmental tasks are ongoing. Thus, every successful manager should be ready to tackle a project, provided it is related to his or her skills, resources, and experience.