Enhancing your project management skills can make the difference between
a project coming in on time and on budget and being a failure.
IT projects live several lives. With long lifespans, ever-growing scopes and multiple stages to manage, the life of those setting out to tame such a wild beast is bound to be challenging. To do so, you need a “particular set of skills” … like these 8 project management skills. But first, let’s have a look at why IT projects actually fail. Let’s get into it:
- Organizations need IT project management skills, and they need them now
- 8 project management skills to run IT projects successfully
- Near Partner, taking your IT project management to the next level
Organizations need IT project management skills, and they need them now
A whopping 70% of all projects fail, for a variety of reasons. The most prevalent ones include lack of planning and management participation, underestimating resources, improper requirements collection and insufficient testing, just to name a few. In fact, the most common project implementation problems occur when everyone goes erratically with the flow and no one is actively sailing the ship.
Let’s take a look at one of the most flagrant examples of poor project management the world has seen. Ever heard of Google Nexus Q? Most likely you haven’t, because it crashed and burned before it even came to market. It consisted of a digital media player, resembling a bowling ball. Nexus Q intended to leverage Google’s online media offerings, such as Google Play Music or YouTube, hence providing a “shared” experience. However, it received mixed reviews from critics following its unveiling, such as weird connection issues and lack of functionality. So, the launch never came. The Nexus Q was quietly shelved, and the remaining prototypes were given away for free.
Without a proper project management, obvious steps are overlooked, projects can turn into disasters, e-graveyards get filled with products and companies write off billions of dollars. And it gets worse: all these problems can come back to haunt you, and clients are not easy forgivers. The good news is that implementing a project management process can reduce the failure rate to under 20%. That’s why you need IT project management skills, and you need them now.
8 project management skills to run IT projects successfully
These are eight essential project management skills you need to succeed and stand out among the competition.
1. Understanding IT architecture and standards
An IT project manager needs a complete vision of the project and to be familiar with ever evolving IT platforms and methodologies. IT projects are filled with buzzwords and acronyms that can confuse even the most experienced IT staff. So, it’s important to master the underlying language and technical terms, in order to fully grasp how the project can meet the client’s needs.
For example, if the project involves SSD storage and an in-memory database, the project manager should understand if that means petabytes of storage for “big data” analysis. It is simply a matter of grasping the resources required to get the job done. Fail to do that, and risk dooming the whole project.
2. Communicating to fill in the blanks
From kick-offs to stakeholder meetings, project managers are constantly communicating and spend a stupendous 90 percent of their time doing it. Even if it’s important to get this part of job done it’s not as easy as it may seem. Humans are complex. You have to know how to approach people, how to create meaningful relationships, and articulate a clearly established vision of what you wish to achieve. And there’s more to it: you’ll need to anticipate doubts, misinterpretations, gaps and other unclear issues before they even happen. If it sounds difficult, Laetitia, one of the latest additions to the Near Partner family, clarifies: “a project manager is both a facilitator and communicator, ensuring everyone shares the same vision”.
Therefore, take the time to think about what you want to say and how you want to say it, using the same language as your team members and your clients. A good communicator can resolve or prevent almost any issue by being crystal clear and fostering an unconstrained flow of information – delivering the correct data to the right person through the appropriate channel.
As a project manager, you’ll also need to prevent failures before they happen and reach the customer. Money can be spent in a preventive way, to avoid failures, and is referred as cost of conformance, which can include activities such as process documentation, training, inspections, and audits. Money can also be spent in a reactive way, after failures have happened, in this case referred as cost of non-conformance, including re-work or scrap, or damage to reputation.
3. Negotiating to manage conflicts
Leading a project implies constant negotiating, from managing resources and engaging suppliers, to dealing with team conflicts. Unavoidable arguments about budgets, scope creep, assets and timelines can easily become a nightmare if not managed thoughtfully.
A project manager needs to be a real-world negotiator to encourage solutions toward a unified goal, choosing the most effective one in each given scenario. Some may call for compromise, others for collaboration or competition to meet the needs of all parties. A project manager is a keeper of both good workplace relationships and quality requirements – a tough balancing act for even the savviest professional.
4. Managing costs
There is more to cost management than overseeing the budget. In fact, project manager often comes across a challenge known as “triple constraint”: cost, time and scope. It is expected that the project manager proposes an estimate of those three boundaries, and this can be quite tricky.
A project manager must walk the tightrope, staying within budget while keeping the timeline on track while delivering (but not overreaching) the initial scope. However, depending on the methodology used in the project, these constraints are managed in a different way. In traditional project management, scope is fixed at the start of a project, whereas time and cost are adjusted to come up with an acceptable plan. On the other side, Agile turns the triple constraint upside down: scope is adjusted to focus on the highest priorities when time (iterations) and cost (team members) are fixed.
5. Making tough choices
Especially valuable project managers have no fear of making difficult, yet well-informed decisions – as part of a team or on their own. In fact, many projects miss their scope, budget or delivery timeline due to unexpected surprises that need to be creatively managed.
To do so, a project manager must always be on the lookout for risks – a potential issue that may or not happen and can impact the project positively or negatively – and issues – that already occurred. For high-impact risks, mitigation plans are needed, whereas for issues, immediate action is necessary to resolve them.
It is important to step back and look at the big picture, ask the hard questions, weigh different options, find a creative resolution – and stick to your guns. After all, project manager have the greatest visibility into both the technical and business sides of the project.
6. Influencing to get things done
It is vital that IT project managers possess the ability to influence others’ decisions and opinions through reason and persuasion. They can set the teams up for success by calling out their strengths and showing them practical ways to improve their weaknesses.
As reliability is a key skill to effective influencing and persuasion, it turns out essential for a project manager to create an environment of trust and confidence with both the team members and the customer. When the teams feel that they can count on project managers to be competent and honest, they are more likely to be positively influenced.
7. Prioritization to mute out the noise
Information overload is a very real phenomenon, but our cognitive load is limited. There is a threshold to the amount of data our minds can process. We have limited resources (such as time, employees and capital), many things to do, and not enough time to perform the way we would like to. In the words of Laetitia, “project managers keep things running smoothly by focusing on the deliverables and being mindful of risks and constraints.”
So, prioritization is essential to figure out where your energy should be focused. Despite all the pings and notifications, a project manager must be able to handle this deluge of information and root out the valuable bits from the noise.
8. Agile thinking
Tradition is not what it used to be. Rigid structures are being replaced by clear and responsive iterative processes, such as agile software development. An agile approach can help project managers organize scheduling, even as resource shortages, standards changes, personnel availability, and other unforeseen issues make it difficult to keep up.
Agile project management enables quick adaptation to market or users expectations changes, as well as work acceleration and risk management, equally vital for the project to be successful, and for the team and the client to be pleased with the methods and the final outcome.
Near Partner, taking your IT project management to the next level
These 8 IT project managements skills are a huge advantage and an invaluable differentiating factor. While the needs may vary dramatically from one project to the next, these cross-cutting skills go a long way toward the success of virtually any project.
Our project managers can help you oversee and deliver IT projects. We have knowledge, technical and business skills, ambition and determination to help. So, let’s grab a chair and talk. How can we help?
