Project management skills

Projects are all about the people; so it is a combination of this range of skills from the hard to soft and everything that encompasses in between that makes for an effective project manager, by which we mean simply a consistently successful PM. It is about getting the balance of skills right so that project management techniques and tools expedite the project rather than adding unnecessary bureaucracy. The human perspective really matters when handling problems or barriers to success.

(Naybour 2016)

Your task

It is essential to understand where one stands concerning his or her own strengths and areas of improvement in order to be a better project manager.

We recommend you check the APM Competence Framework which sets out the competencies required for the effective project management. The self-assessment document includes 27 competencies based around outcomes that project professionals need to achieve and a five-point scoring scale for assessing performance against the application and knowledge criteria.

Reflect on your own project management skills. Are there any that you think you may want to develop further?

References

_{Krahn, J. and Hartment, F. (2006). Effective project leadership: a combination of project manager skills and competencies in context. Paper presented at PMI® Research Conference: New Directions in Project Management, Montréal, Québec, Canada. Project Management Institute. https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/leadership-project-manager-skills-competencies-8115}

_{Naybour, P. (2016, April 22). Project management skills: the hard, the soft and the in-between. Association for Project Management. https://www.apm.org.uk/blog/project-management-skills-the-hard-the-soft-and-the-in-between/}