Project management is not an easy responsibility. You need more than just experience to effectively manage and stay on top of everything as far as your project is concerned. Also, more often than not, most projects don’t come in handy.
Whether you like it or not, you’ll encounter problems that will test your capability to handle such situations in which you need to find your way out. And as a project manager, you need to be in control and you should always be able to address everything accordingly as expected of you.
While project management is sometimes handled by non-project management degree holders, they manage to make their responsibility effective as it should be, as the project goes on.
However, there is still a difference between self-taught project managers and those who study project management online or at the university.
While the goal of this article is mainly to highlight important roles of project managers, let’s not differentiate those who did and did not earn project management degree.
Let’s get on with our primary objective.
Presenting PROGRESS Report
Accomplishment reports in every project are always requested from project managers. This is a documentation report generated containing detailed information on how the project is going as far as the time frame is concerned.
As a project manager, you are the only one responsible and expected to produce an accomplishment report and state whether you are or are not behind of timeframe. In this way, you can make necessary changes whether it is or it is not in favor of you.
Understanding the REAL situation
A good project manager listens to his team. You don’t just expect to get things done your way, regardless of what will be the consequences. In some cases, your manpower knows more better than you because they actually go into details of what work needs to be done.
As a project manager, your job is to make the necessary decision and action based on information from your manpower. However, you should also have personal knowledge of the situation and not just depending on what your manpower tell you.
Ability to Make NECESSARY Decision
There will be more situations where a project manager needs to make unexpected decisions that could affect the project development whether it is for good or bad. Not all projects plans are implemented accordingly and most require necessary changes.
As a project manager, it is your call whether you will push through what has been structured in the project plan. However, you should prepare your answer for possible concerns such as why the plan will not be followed.
Ability to Define REALISTIC Project Scope
Projects do certainly require a lot of time. Inevitably, they sometimes exceed the deadline. A good project manager must be able to define a realistic time frame that will be allotted to a particular project. Sometimes, project managers add a few working days to prepare for unexpected delay or problems that may arise during the entire project development.
Must Know to PRIORITIZE
More importantly, a good project manager must know what needs to be done accordingly. This usually applies when unexpected problems occur during the project development. This situation will test your ability to control the situation and measure what is more important among the rest.
Here’s a simple scenario,
Your boss wants to tests all the buttons on the website you are working on prior to launch.
And you are currently working on the about page of the website but you are requested to do a test run on the website prior to the launch of the website. However, the form on your contact us page is not yet working.
Would you continue working on the about page or will finish the form first?
While about us and contact us page are both important, you should be able to measure what is most important between the two pages.
Project management is not just about skills you learned from experience but also about the knowledge you learned from your school days which helps you how to react in various situations that test your ability and knowledge about project management.
