Successful Project Management Tips

How to become a successful project manager? Professionals in any industry often find it difficult to list the key success factors. No matter you are an engineer, architect, or finance specialist, there are many ways and processes to be followed but each industry requires its own methods. The same goes for the field of project management. Although, there are certain things that every project management professionals should know such as planning, scheduling, resource leveling, budgeting, you need to develop your own methods and approaches to achieve success. In this article, we will discuss six successful project management tips that can help you to become more successful in your field.

Table of Contents

1. Don’t Promise What You Can’t Deliver

Setting reasonable expectations is one of the most important success factors. If you set low expectations, of course, your possibility of success will be around %100, but in general, everybody will be aware of your little achievements. On the other hand, if you set high expectations, it will be difficult for you to complete the deliverables on time without using extra funds and resources. In other words, if you promise to give more than it is asked for, it will be a bit dangerous considering the risk factors.

Therefore, set reasonable expectations and keep everyone satisfied but sometimes, do not hesitate to take risks and promise to over-deliver if you are %100 sure.

2. Get to Know Your Team Members

Human is in the origin of everything. We perform projects with the contributions of clients, team members, vendors, stakeholders, and anybody involved in the processes. No matter how many people are working with you, you need to know the strength and weaknesses of your team members in order to assign the right person to the right task. As a project manager or a team leader, get to know the individual members as best as you can. Which software does your planning engineer know? What program does the design engineer use? How often does your procurement engineer update vendor lists?

Not every project fits every individual’s requirements, but if you know your team member’s strengths and weaknesses, you will decide how to use them effectively.

3. Put the Right People in the Right Job

Successful Project Management is one of the key organizational strategies in today’s challenging business environment. Each project manager has different skills and competencies. The same goes for project team members. You need to consider the knowledge and abilities of candidates while forming a team. For example, a large and sophisticated project requires more skilled staff than a small, low-budget project. On the other hand, assigning a highly experienced staff for a secondary task will be costly.

As a project manager, you need to put the right people in the right job in your project in order to keep members motivated and increase productivity.

4. Be Honest

Undoubtedly that honesty is one of the most important policies while managing a project. Not everyone needs to know everything all the time, however, if you hide many things from your team members or stakeholders, it will be difficult to get their support when you need it regarding your secrets. Believe in transparency in project management, share information and let them come to you with more insights.

Project teams often share information through daily and weakly meetings with project stakeholders for successful project management. Progress meetings provide a chance to project staff for tracking the performance, understanding the overall health of each project, and addressing major issues. However, you need to communicate with people through one on one meetings and conversations regarding their tasks without involving anybody.

This will improve productivity because most of the information received by each team member is related to his/her task. So, he/she will spend less time and energy to do their best by losing less time.

For example, you have two coders working on two different projects, you might encourage them to provide their recommendations related to each other’s work but you need to organize separate meetings to discuss the performance of each project.

5. Meet Deadlines

One of the main responsibilities of a project manager is completing a project on time and budget by meeting deadlines and major project milestones. Therefore, as a project manager, you need to have advanced planning and scheduling skills to track the project schedule and take action in case of delays. Of course, most of the projects should be completed in a limited time period, but if you focus on the major project milestones and procure long-lead items earlier, your team will be less likely to put things off until the last minute.

6. Be a Good Leader

Having a good project manager is a must-have for an organization that aims at successful project management. First of all, ask yourself, what is the difference between leadership and management? Although many people use both concepts interchangeably, not all managers are good leaders. In order to be a good leader in your project, you must have some traits such as;

Inspiration
Vision
Integrity
Communication

If you guide your team members rather than just managing and forcing them to work, you will increase your chance to influence people towards the achievement of project goals.

Bonus # Develop Your Emotional Intelligence Skills in the Workplace

According to the researches, highly Emotionally Intelligent project managers are more successful than their counterparts. Because they have a set of skills that help to manage both their own and other people’s emotions.

In addition, highly Emotionally Intelligent project managers tend to have happier and more productive employees.

Last Words on Successful Project Management Tips

In this article, we shared successful project management tips to answer; how to become a successful project manager? Achieving project management success is not difficult if you can obey some basic rules. If you want to add or share anything regarding project management success, please use the comments section below.