VIEWPOINTS

Top Ten Skills for Project Managers

By Lisa MacLean

Wentworth Institute of Technology
Boston, Massachusetts, USA , USA

1) If you’re going to put the fox in charge of the henhouse, plan on losing some chickens. If the project manager (PM) is seeing the project only as a means of showcasing themselves and their talents, or a way to bring negative and/or false information regarding coworkers to management, you can lose your best people. This can work as a way to make the messenger look superior, make other team members look bad or to shift blame. It will anger the better workers and send the poorer ones scurrying for their resumes coming out of the shared laser printer. Both reactions suction energy from the project.

If a project starts missing deadlines and people are backbiting and finger pointing, the Fox is on the job. People start to leave. Job quality falls but it’s everyone’s fault but the Project Manager, who praises you to your face but trashes you to higher-ups, which you discover at evaluation time.

2) A good Project Manager is respectful to everyone, not just the “important” people. There are many unsung heroes of the information age. The data entry people have tedious jobs, yet are your first line of defense when it comes to keeping data clean. The person who cleans your work area so that you can have a nicer space deserves the same courtesy and respect as the supervisor who comes by and interprets your uncluttered desk as a sign of an organized mind. Anyone wearing a name tag should be greeted by their name.

An effective project manager knows to make everyone feel important to the project and that they have a stake in its success. This kind of Project Manager gets projects done, and generates good will for the next project. A good measure of this is that other project members are speaking positively about that PM.

Click here to read entire paper

About the Author Lisa MacLean Author Lisa MacLean is Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Systems at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. She worked in industry doing programming, systems analysis and design, and network and database administration for over a decade before taking her faculty appointment at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Rhode Island College and Bentley University. Lisa can be contacted at macleanl@wit.edu.