What are the key concepts of project management, and how do they apply to different types of projects?

Project management is a complex process that requires a deep understanding of the project's goals, resources, and overall progress. A project manager's primary responsibility is to manage the project and delegate technical work to other team members, while maintaining a comprehensive view of the project's status and ensuring its success.

In order to effectively manage a project, project managers must possess a broad range of skills and knowledge. Technical skills are crucial for understanding and mastering the specific activities involved in the project, while human skills are necessary for building collaboration and working effectively with team members. Conceptual skills are also important for understanding the project's broader political and social context, as well as its relationship to the organization as a whole.

Robert L Katz's three-skill approach to management provides a helpful framework for understanding the skills required for successful project management. Technical skills are essential for understanding the technical aspects of the project, while human skills are necessary for building strong relationships with team members and stakeholders. Conceptual skills are required for understanding the project's broader context and how it fits into the organization's goals and objectives.

Overall, project managers must be skilled in managing comprehensive professional teams and possess a range of technical, human, and conceptual skills in order to ensure project success. Effective project management requires careful oversight of resources, collaboration with team members and stakeholders, and a deep understanding of the project's goals and objectives. By mastering these skills, project managers can ensure that their projects are completed on time, within budget, and to the satisfaction of all stakeholders involved.

To perform their role the Project Manager requires the skills:

TechnicalHumanConceptual•Technical Awareness
•Budgeting
•Estimating Time•Leadership
•Management
•Listening & Communication
•Negotiating
•Conflict Management
•Personal Time Management
•Team Building•Organising
•Planning
•Problem Solving
•Analysis
•Decision Making

REFERENCES:

• Katz, RL 1974, ‘Skills of an effective administrator’, in Business Classics: Fifteen Key
• Concepts for Managerial Success, Harvard Business Review, 1991, USA, pp. 23-35

It has been common in the industry that specialists with more excellent experience are promoted to managerial positions expecting to bring good fruits, but that’s not true. Considering project management, the successful transition from specialist to manager requires recognising the necessity to learn new skills and then work to develop them. That’s the moment in the career of most professionals; if they are to progress further, they must complete the evolution from specialist to manager. Some are successful and advance to executive positions, whereas others struggle in their new roles despite being competent specialists.

Although a few fortunate individuals intuitively pick up the ability to manage, the great majority of those who successfully make the transition do so by recognising that they must learn new skills.

The transition from technical specialist to project manager requires skills in managing staff, building productive connections with fellow managers, clients, and strategic partners to support the organisation acquire its strategic goals.

Motivation and leadership skills are necessary for practical staff management. A project manager’s ability to uplift project teams reaches from their capability to administer rewards and penalties. Project managers who manage poorly tend to be over-dependent on punishment to get results; this usually creates more problems than solves. On the other hand, good leaders are not afraid of punishment or discipline, yet, they learn to use rewards to encourage team fellows. They do this by identifying individual requirements, redesigning jobs or setting challenging goals.

The absence of leadership skills has differing impacts in different situations. Poor project managers see leadership as nothing more than giving orders when handling people outside their profession. They usually get a submission but at the expense of a less powerful or confident team

and often lose productivity. When they manage experts from their discipline (engineers in teams or lawyers in a group), they go to the other extreme and delegate to the point of the action of renouncing or rejecting their responsibility. The most challenging part of the shift is the need for project managers to build productive relationships with their fellow managers, contractors and clients, many of whom are from different disciplines.

Specialists often work in isolation.

They have notable independence and are generally left alone to focus on their task; consequently, they develop their terminology and degrade other project management functions such as risk management or communications management by usually labelling them just ‘admin‘.

Life as the project manager could not be more different; each day brings a creek of interruptions and the continuing need to negotiate (or compete for resources) with other managers. Good project managers are prepared to accept that their technical expertise is only one of the many vital competencies to ensure business success. They quickly pick up the skills needed to communicate with their equivalents, contractors, clients and contribute as equal team members.

By contrast, poor managers adopt a mindset of chauvinistic defensiveness and self-righteous intolerance of criticism by locking themselves in their office to get some ‘real work’ done without being bothered by ‘admin’. Consequently, they are excluded from critical discussions of the project’s liability, team, and careers.

Another element of the transition to the project manager is the requirement to make strategic decisions. Experts may be given autonomy regarding working on the project or dealing with a contractor. Still, they do not generally decide which projects they work on or which clients they will have. On the other hand, project managers spend much of their time making (or contributing to) these critical decisions. Strategic decision-making requires an ability to step back and see the big picture. After a career focussing on their discipline, some professionals find this difficult to achieve. As a result, they tend to micro-manage their team, getting so lost in technical details that they completely lose sight of the big picture.

The good news for aspiring project managers is that leaders can learn all these skills. Once learned, leaders should regularly practise them until they are applied automatically. Technical experts or professionals who wish to become project managers first need to develop strategic and people management skills and manage relationships and then seek out every opportunity to demonstrate that they can apply them. Suppose a permanent project management position is not available. In that case, temporary jobs such as filling in for a project manager on leave may provide that opportunity.

From technical expert to the project manager is not a promotion – it is a career change.

From: PM Network – May 1998

John P Sahlin is a graduate of the US Naval Academy and is the manager of training and consulting at Project Control, an international project management consulting and software company in Annapolis, Md.

As a Project Management Consultant, I have encountered organisations with narrow definitions of project management; definitions that basically describe a projectised functional manager or a technical lead – project managers who are directly involved with produce development and who are more like the technical expert on the team, with a few scheduling / reporting responsibilities.

This definition of project management caused me to re evaluate my resume. Do I have the technical expertise to be a project manager in today’s world? I do not have a technical degree, but I have significant management training, including trail-by-fire training in project management. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge describes a relationship among general management techniques, project management techniques, and application area knowledge (technical skills), but does not discuss the depth of technical knowledge a project manager must have in order to be successful.

With the wide array of industries making use of project management, it is unlikely that there will be any consensus on the depth of technical knowledge required. Despite this, a few general rules apply across all application areas.

Never Tell Your Team How to Perform a Task.

By setting and prioritising the project goals (milestones, control gates, and so forth), you are telling the members of your team what needs to be achieved. Leave it to the technical experts to decide how to accomplish the tasks. If we have learned nothing else from countless hours of team building exercises, we should learn that a group can brainstorm more effectively than an individual. It follows that leaving the how to the technical team is likely to result in an option you will not have considered by yourself.

Leaving the technical direction decisions to the experts does not hamper your ability to manage. In fact, be decentralising the technical issues, you improve your ability to manage.We are limited in the amount of information we can control. By passing the technical decisions to the technical leads, our energies are available to focus on the project’s strategic goals.

Know What You Don’t Know, and Know the Sources of That Information.

The most important lesson you can learn in project management is that you can’t know it all. Knowing the limits of your knowledge is invaluable to a manager. By recognising your limits, you can focus on the all-important task of identifying the sources of this knowledge.

These sources can take the form of media or members of your team. When identifying these sources of information, you must also consider the availability and veracity of those sources.

“I Don’t Know” is an Acceptable Answer.

In project management, unlike school, there is a penalty for guessing. By guessing, you endanger your reputation, as well as that of your entire team. By refusing to admit the limits of your knowledge, you risk the success of your project. More important, you risk losing the respect of your team. The leadership aspects of project management are often ignored, but integrity is your No 1 ally in organisations where you may not have direct authority (ie, functional or matrix organisations).

An important corollary to this rule is: Never answer the same question with “I don’t know” twice. If you don’t know the answer, find out what the answer is and don’t forget it. You can greatly improve team morale by showing the team that you are willing to learn and that you are enthusiastic about the project. Ignorance is forgivable, laziness is not.

Learn as Much as is Practical.

While no one expects you to be the expert in all fields, you should be able to speak intelligently about the technology involved with your project. You should be able to explain to your sponsor (or customer) why it is beneficial to choose a particular course of action. You may also have to make decisions based on reports from your technical experts. In order to weigh technical options, you must be able to understand them.

The down side of training is that it takes you away from your duties. When deciding what technical training to pursue, ask yourself if it will help you manage your team on your next project. If the training is unlikely to have any bearing on future projects, it is probably not worth taking you off your current project to pursue. Your primary responsibility as a manager is to lead your team – not to be the single point of contact for technical issues.

Know Enough to Avoid Getting “Snowed”.

It is a sad fact of human nature that we try to cover our faults or failures. We are tempted to conceal our blemishes with technical jargon and statistics. A project manager needs to have enough technical knowledge to week through the numbers and derive the true meaning of the reports.

An example of this issue is Earned Value reporting. I remember my first Quarterly Progress Review on a contract with the US Navy: I was representing the government project manager. The contractor building the system was giving an EVA presentation to the government project manager. Everyone’s eyes glazed over as the cost control expert rattled off a series of figures and acronyms. During a break, one of the contractor’s engineers asked me to explain the presentation his company had just given. I showed him that given the current performance figures (about 70 percent CPI and SPI) it was mathematically impossible to achieve their goal of 92 percent CPI and SPI by the end of the project. He looked at me and said, “So you’re telling me that we’re lying to you.” I just smiled.

Project Leadership.

These rules are not peculiar to project management. In fact, they are an application of general leadership skills I developed in the Navy. Little attention is paid to the leadership aspects of project management. Perhaps this is because the word leadership makes many of us think of Patton and his tanks, or Farragut at Mobile Bay. But leadership is not unique to the military; we can lead our project teams without being “command and control” martinets.

The best definition of leadership I have ever heard is the “art of getting people to do what they don’t want to, and making them think it was their idea in the first place.” Project leadership is the subset of project management that deals with interpersonal communications and relationships. This set of skills is used throughout the project lifecycle and in all process groups defined by the PMBOK Guide.

As project managers, we spend our careers communicating – with our team, to our customers, and with upper management. Our interpersonal communication skills are vastly more important to us than our specific technical knowledge. If we can successfully lead projects in one application area, we could take the lead in projects in other areas. A project manager in a software firm could make the transition to construction management with a relatively short learning curve by focusing on his or her ability to lead the project team to success – the technical skills are secondary.

Recommendations for Industry.

Moving into the next century, organisations need to redefine the term project management. The project manager must become more than a technical lead, enabling organisations to leverage the wealth of experience and leadership skills that can improve their quality, efficiency, and “bottom line”. In order to adopt the practices of project management, organisations need to place more value on the leadership (non technical) aspects of project management.

A PROJECT MANAGER DOES NOT need intense technical training. It is more important that project managers hone the leadership and management skills that are common to all application areas.