What does a project manager need to know? If you look down the job adverts on project management websites or in magazines, you’ll see a long list of skills that employers ask for. If you look at the list of features on project management software tools, you’ll find a host of functionality that broadly tallies to supporting the skills and techniques used by project managers. But which of these are most important? Here are 5 critical skills for your project management career, all things that you can practice and improve at, and all things that will help you progress up the career ladder if you choose to. 1. Scheduling Yes, one of the most important things that a project manager should be able to do is project scheduling. This is the task of putting all the project activities in order, establishing the dependencies and linkages between the activities and then monitoring the schedule as the work progresses. Some would say that being able to put together a comprehensive project schedule is probably the most critical skill for your project management career. Have you ever heard of a project manager who can’t plan? 2. Risk Management Being able to deal with the unexpected in a proactive fashionrisk management is another essential. Basic risk management isn’t that hard, but it does take a certain discipline to be able to look to the future and work out all the things that could go wrong. You need to be a bit pessimistic! Risk management is about more than just identifying the things that might happen in the future to scupper your project. Once you have the list of potential threats, you also need to be able to put together comprehensive mitigation plans using a range of risk responses. There’s an element of team management and leadership involved in this too as you’ll need to be able to work effectively with your colleagues to allocate ownership of the risks and to carry out the mitigation plans. 3. Resource Allocation Resource allocation might sound simple, but there is a lot more to it than just clicking a button to update your project schedule with the name of the person who is going to do the task. For example, there’s a whole host of communication skills involved with delegating work and ensuring that your team members understand what it is that they are required to do. Then there is dealing with resources who don’t really have the right skills and who need to be coached or trained so that they don’t let you and the project down. Resource allocation software will help you track who is doing what when and it will also make it easy for you to see who has been given too much work to do. Learning how to use resource reports will help spot problems and ensure that your team members are available to do the tasks when you need them to be. 4. Budgeting Your finance department may have overall responsibility budgeting for the project expenses and budgets for every project, but you’ll still need to be able to track expenditure on your project back to an appropriate account code. Budget management skills also include being able to use spreadsheets or other expense management software so that you aren’t keeping all the receipts in a folder and doing manual accounting – who does that these days, anyway? Budgeting skills range from being able to put together a comprehensive list of everything that the project will need to buy through to forecasting how much of that expenditure will take place when. It can even include things like doing accruals if your project falls across two financial years. Some companies will expect you to be well versed in techniques like earned value analysis, which is a way of tracking actual cost and effort against what you forecasted. If that all sounds complicated, it needn’t be. On bigger projects you could even be allocated a financial analyst to do it all for you, and your role in budgeting will be simply approving that invoices can be paid! Your Project Management Office may also have some financial experts and they will probably have budget and tracking templates, and there are bound to be other experienced project managers in the team who can help. Financial management skills are things that you can pick up along the way during your career, so be prepared to build on these gradually as you work on larger and larger projects. 5. Influencing Most project managers find themselves working with teams where the individuals do not directly report to them. It can make managing the team difficult, as you have no direct authority to find out about or approve vacation requests, for example. You can also find your team members being allocated non-project work by their line managers, which can make resource planning on your project very difficult. Projects also involve a lot of stakeholders, all of whom will have slightly different requirements and expectations – and all of whom need managing. This is where your influencing skills come into play. Not only will you need to influence the line managers of your resources but you’ll also be putting those skills to good use ensuring that your stakeholders have a positive impact on the project. The downside with influencing is that it is very difficult to learn. While you can go on courses to pick up scheduling, risk management and other skills, influencing is so dependent on your interpersonal communication skills and personality that it is hard to teach. You can however, get better with practice – it’s all about trying to create win-win situations for everyone. While there are lots of things that you need to be a good project manager, these 5 skills are critical to being able to progress in your career. If you do want to take steps towards managing bigger projects, keep a note of where you use these skills so that when you are asked in an interview you have great examples where you can demonstrate your abilities.

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