Top 5 Hard and Soft Skills for a Successful Project Manager

The demand of Project Manager profession

Projects are the backbone of the modern economy. The demand for project managers over the next 10 years is growing faster. By 2027, the project management workforce requirement is expected to grow by 33 percent, or nearly 22 million new jobs.

Basically, Project Management is both an art and science of getting things done. An art because there is no one definitive answer for how to best manage a project, and a science because there are well-developed techniques and processes that can help significantly to complete a project successfully.

The Project Manager needs to manage three flows on any project. That is the flow of resources, the flow of information, and the financial flow. It ensures projects overcome common obstacles like, inaccurate forecasting, manual data input, or storage errors, improper resource allocation, misplaced budget, or schedule optimism, lacking enough data to make informed decisions.

To make the right correct decision at right time, the project manager needs both soft (art) & hard (science) skills for managing a project.

Do you know what are the critical hard and soft skills for Project Management? Below are the top five Hard skills and Soft skills which any successful project managers possess to meet the project objectives.

Top 5 Hard Skills for Project Manager

Hard skills are learned abilities acquired and enhanced through practice, repetition, and education. Hard skills are important because they increase productivity and efficiency. Unlike soft skills, people can prove their hard skill competencies by producing a certificate, degree, apprenticeship, or work experience.

 The top 5 Hard skills for a Project Manager are:

1. Planning skills: Accurately estimation time and efforts are the key activities of any project. For a smaller project, this can be done by the project manager itself but for bigger projects, it is usually done by a planner or scheduler. However, but project manager will need to validate and review the project schedule. Identifying & integration of various functions and required resources are a critical success for any project.
2. Budgeting skills: Generally, the projects are bounded by time and budget constraints. The Project Manager should have sufficient skills to allocate the budget based on project cost estimates. Every WBS of a project requires some budget allocation to complete the work and project managers are responsible to ensure the project remains within its allocated budget.
3. Risk Management: Projects are continuously exposed to various schedule and cost risks. Managing these risks is the responsibility of the project manager. It’s not just about managing people and resources. Identifying risks and mitigating those risks by the project team should be acted on a daily basis.
4. Project Data Analytics: As the project progress, it continuously generates key information and data about project performance. The Project Manager should be able to measure and analyze these data & key performance indicators (KPIs). This helps the Project manager to make informed and effective decisions. Project managers need to understand and analyze this data with respect to ongoing project work and plans.
5. Domain Expertise: To effectively manage a project, project managers must be proficient in industry-specific knowledge. For an IT project manager, it is critical to have a clear understanding of the software industry and coding knowledge. Similar to construction projects, a civil engineer will have a better understating of construction work. It is very difficult to manage a project if you know little or nothing about the specific industry.

Soft Skills for Project Managers

Soft skill is a personal attribute that supports situational awareness and enhances an individual’s ability to get the project work done. The term soft skills are often used as a synonym for people skills or emotional intelligence.

 Soft skills are difficult to teach and are behavioral and related to personality. Soft skills competencies cannot be proven by producing a certificate or degree. Soft skills can be learned and practiced while working on the job or even at home.

 The 5 Topmost powerful soft skills for a Project Manager are:

1. Presentation Skills: Presentation skills are needed for delivering effective and informative presentations to the stakeholders. These skills require the knowledge of various areas such as the structure of your presentation, data regarding project schedule, lookahead plan, budget status, risks, and mitigation plans. Presentation skills are critical to conveying the project status and correct information to the concerned stakeholder and business leaders. Learning how to design presentations that will hold people’s attention, present project status and risks in an understandable format is key for getting everyone on board.
2. Communication Skills: Communication skills are the abilities you use when giving and receiving different kinds of information. The ability to communicate clearly and effectively is an important skill for project managers. Project managers use various tools and platforms to communicate with project teams, outside subcontractors, key stakeholders, and sponsors. In addition to the basics like speaking and writing, effective communication also includes being able to understand and identify general sentiments and nonverbal cues like body language and tone of voice. This helps the project managers to identify the sign of trouble among team members and things get out of control.
3. Leadership Skills: Project managers must be able to use their leadership skills to communicate clearly and effectively, inspire, influence, motivate, and build a consensus among their team—especially through periods of high stress. These include strategic thinking, planning and delivery, people management, change management, communication, and persuasion, and influencing.
4. Decision-Making Skills: The project Manager must create clarity out of ambiguity. They must evaluate risks and opportunities and make a commitment to achieve their goals. Also, the project manager needs to assure their decisions maintain company vision and business goals. The project manager usually faces high pressure, complex circumstances, opportunity deadlines, too much, too little, or conflicting information throughout the project. Decision-making in complex situations is never easy in projectized organization.
5. Conflict Resolution: Conflict is a normal part of any project. After stakeholders can’t be expected to agree on everything, all the time. Throughout a project, there are bound to be situations when tensions flare and conflicts arise. This can happen between members of the team or between clients or between stakeholders or between management leaders. A project manager must be skilled at navigating these situations and defusing tensions for the good of the team, stakeholders, and project. When conflict is mismanaged, it can cause great harm to a client (internal as well external) relationship, but when handled in a respectful, positive way, conflict provides an opportunity to strengthen the bond between team members.

Conclusion

The project manager’s hard skills alone don’t translate into project success as project team members also need to use other skills, such as soft skills, that contribute to customer satisfaction.

Hard skills focus on practical work abilities and skills, whereas soft skills focus on behaviors and personalities, such as social and communication skills. Soft skills are less tangible and harder to teach.

Projects require employees to work in a team, improving employee abilities to have positive contributions and effective interaction with others to accomplish tasks.

As a result, the Project Manager should possess teamwork, collaboration, communication, problem-solving skills, and other emotional and cognitive capabilities to work in a multimember, multidisciplinary, and multilocation team.

Tell me, which skill do you utilize most while working on the project? Let me know by leaving a comment below right now.

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