Sponsored by Synergist:
As a project manager in an agency, are you confident that your managerial style is enough to motivate and push your team forward?
Do you know what skills are required to lead a project effectively? A successful project manager must have a plan for their entire project from beginning to end and be confident in their ideas.
However, they also must have an appreciation for when things aren’t working and when changes need to be made.
To find out what it takes to be a successful project manager, keep some of the following tips in mind.
Don’t Micro-manage
For your project to run smoothly, one of the most important things you can do as a manager is to keep your team on board always.
You’ve got to keep the level of enthusiasm within your team high at all times. Otherwise, their lack of enthusiasm is going to be visible within their output of work.
It’s important to not focus too much on your ideas, and instead, focus on being flexible. It’s a good quality to be confident in your own ideas, but your team will be knowledgeable too, so it’s important to be open to suggestions rather than being strict and perfecting the most minor details.
Any signs of micro-management can be perceived as a lack of faith in your staff.
Be Reasonable with Time
When you’re leading a team, you need to be aware of each member’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as which tasks suit them best.
So, when you’re distributing tasks to your project group, make sure you give them enough time to complete the tasks at hand.
Time management is essential for any project, however, if you’re giving your team unrealistic time expectations, then you’re going to put your colleagues under significant pressure. The stress that comes from this pressure can act as a major hindrance to productivity.
Use Project Management Software
Using project planning software is essential when it comes to successful project management.
Here you have the central database for all of your project information, where each member of your team can have full view of the essential details. This type of software also has the functionality to retrieve any valuable documents that have become lost.
One of the many excellent things about this software is that all your project information is in one place, so you can easily see potential overruns and deadlines in danger of slipping. Plus, individual project team members can see the work assigned to them and their own deadlines.
Know Everything
To put it simply, knowledge is power when it comes to being a successful project manager.
You have to be the source of information for you and your team, so it’s essential that you become fully knowledgeable about the ins and outs of the project before you begin.
Without understanding the key project deliverables and really understanding your client’s expectations and motivations before you start, you’re going to be totally unaware of what success looks like in the end.
Be Bold with Decisions
Decision making can make or break a project manager.
Good project management can only occur when the right messages are delivered at the right time. You have to make quick decisions to stay on schedule, which may involve weighing different priorities with objectives. You’ll also have to be prepared when certain elements of your project are not working as well as you’d like.
Make sure to keep logging any changes that are made and communicating this to your team.
Plan Ahead
This is a real test of your project management skills.
Planning ahead will help you forecast how an entire project will pan out. Obviously, as time passes, there might be unexpected changes in personnel, deadlines, or objectives, but with a well-thought-out plan, you will be better prepared to deal with this.
It’s very important to plan for change, as when unexpected things happen, you’ll potentially have to amend your entire plan to meet new requirements. A good project manager should be flexible and be able to easily adapt their plans in situations like this.
Another likelihood is that at some point during the project, some of your team members will complete work earlier than expected. If you notice this happening, don’t allow this free time to derail your productivity, instead get your team to use that time to get ahead of their work to ensure that other deadlines are met.
Tools such as Synergist can really help project managers with this. Their scheduling functionality allows you to add details about each task, so when one is completed, your team will have all the information they need to immediately get started on the next job, even if you’re out the office or in a meeting.
With these tips, you now know what it takes to be a successful project manager within an agency. It’s important to adopt your own management style, but it’s even more important to distance yourself from the traits that can have a detrimental effect on productivity.
