If you are looking to advance in your chosen career, you need to polish your project management skills and become the go-to person in your team or company. As a result, you’ll be more effective in your roles, have more fun, and increase your marketability.
This year, your project management skills must have been challenged because of the pandemic. You’ve been forced to make some adjustments and formulate new strategies to ensure that projects are completed as expected. Thus, you need to find time to learn new things to continuously improve your abilities, especially for the year 2021
Be The Best Project Manager!
Your goal is to become better. Thus, remember these few things first:
- Get clear on the project details from the start so you can chart out a strategy for success, without bumps along the way.
- Set realistic and achievable goals.
- Take a class and earn a certification as a project manager. Become part of the best team ever assembled.
Here are some project management tips you can follow for the year 2021:
1. Know Your Team Members
After taking on a project and preparing the steps for its completion, you need to make sure you are familiar with the team you’re going to handle. This will allow you to adjust to their different personalities and make working and delegating tasks easier. Knowing your team members means getting to know their abilities, as well as their limitations. Thus, you will not make the mistake of overloading someone who needs a few adjustments first when it comes to being introduced to new tasks.
2. Brief Your Team
Make sure everyone on your team knows the basic functions of your business model. Everyone needs to know how to communicate, delegate, monitor, manage, collect data, and use the appropriate software. These things will help them stay on track and never lose momentum. For example, when the clock reads 7 PM, everyone needs to know what the next step is. Don’t wait until the last minute to discuss it. It might be a good time to review the schedule or check the daily or weekly progress report.
3. Practice Constant Communication
Next, be sure your team knows how to communicate. Make sure everyone has either a dedicated individual or designated representative who speaks up or has regular communication with all other team members about important issues. Remember the saying, “You can’t have good people if you don’t have clear instructions.” Likewise, be approachable to the rest of the team. A good project manager is one with whom people are comfortable speaking, especially when a problem occurs that can cause a delay in the given timeline. Your team should be able to easily inform you of their problems and progress without being scared.
4. Foster Agreement And Understanding
Make sure everyone is on the same page. It may seem like common sense, but many people don’t communicate their project management goals and objectives out to their team. This causes problems for everyone involved. If someone isn’t doing their job, there’s a good chance that others aren’t doing theirs, too. By making sure everyone is on the same page, you’ll get more done, which means fewer problems and more satisfied employees.
5. Be In Control
One of the most important tips to follow in project management is that the manager should stay in control. When problems arise, it’s the manager who has to solve them. Some managers become frustrated because they’re not sure how to solve problems. They need to get clear on the project management software, track the activities of each team member, and let everyone know what’s going on at all times. This doesn’t mean micromanaging at once; it does, however, mean having clear guidelines in place so people know what needs to be done and when.
6. Do Quality Control
In addition, make sure everyone understands the value of quality control. In any project management position, quality control is vital. Sometimes, however, a person’s responsibility may be more controlling than overseeing others. When this occurs, project leaders should try to ensure everyone is on the same page. Give people responsibilities they can live up to, such as managing their own time and producing quality work. When teams have this kind of understanding, they can focus on doing tasks together, rather than micromanaging. You can even adopt different frameworks, like the scale agile (SaFe), to make sure that your process is more streamlined and easier to follow.
7. Prepare For Possible Delays
In project management, you can’t expect everything to just go smoothly. At some point in your timeline, something could come up that might cause a delay, like a team member getting sick or software crashing. With this, you need to take that into consideration and make the necessary adjustments to your project timeline before finalizing it. This way, when something comes up, you will be ready and will still have enough time to finish the project and provide the best results. Also, try exploring different online software that can aid in project development.
8. Don’t Overdo Micromanagement
There’s nothing worse than an overzealous project manager, who micromanages excessively. The best way to do this is to make sure you give your team members specific examples of what they need to do. This doesn’t mean micromanaging them at all times; it simply means giving specific examples of things they need to do in order to meet your goals. It may sound simplistic, but when done effectively, it will work.
Final Thoughts
In project management, you need to be smart and patient. Being smart is an asset because you can think quickly on your feet. Patience is good to combine with being smart because while thinking on your feet can provide quick alternatives to tackle an issue, sometimes, you also need to mull over a few things before making big decisions. Likewise, patience is also needed in handling your team. You cannot avoid little skirmishes and issues in following the right process. Thus, you need to be able to help your team in maximizing their abilities. This way, you are all going to be working towards a common goal.
HussaiN is a full-time professional blogger from India. He is passionate about content writing, tech enthusiasts, and computer technologies. Apart from content writing on the internet, he likes reading various tech magazines and several other blogs on the internet. Email ID: [email protected]
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