Project management: 6 areas you need to master
Project management: 6 areas you need to master
By Stephanie Oley
Running late with your marketing campaign, tax strategy, IT upgrade or other major business initiative? Chances are there’s a project management issue at stake. And if you have some solid targets to meet, then you need to fix that problem. The good news is this can be learned.
Project management has been named repeatedly by LinkedIn as one of the Top 10 career skills to have. Our facilitators at CCE cite a number of reasons for this, especially the pressures that all businesses face to compete in a high-tech global economy. An estimated 25 million professionals are needed worldwide to meet demand, and it’s not just in traditional sectors such as construction or manufacturing.
Good project management skills sit behind the success of projects in a surprising range of sectors. It’s used to plan annual exhibition calendars at major art galleries, and multimillion-dollar tech upgrades at government departments. Project management drives everything from better remote-working strategies to corporate branding and change-management programs.
Perhaps you’ve already helped implement any large new systems or processes at work, all while educating your team at every step. That’s project management, even if you didn’t know it at the time.
Why project management, why now?
Few would disagree that projects have become more complex, and tied to more stringent targets than in the past. You could call it learning from past mistakes.
Famous project overruns in history range from India’s Taj Mahal to Sydney’s Opera House and Europe’s Channel Tunnel, all of which stretched years past their forecast completion dates. Tragic project fails include the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion of 1986, and the Titan submarine implosion of 2023. No organisation wants to be associated with such heartbreak and disappointment.
Perhaps as a result, modern projects usually involve multiple stakeholders, diverse teams and a host of intricate systems and tools. Effective project management uses clear frameworks to tackle various risks and complexities, all while sticking to budgets and timelines along the way.
Project management is especially important in large multinational workplaces. Teams are increasingly scattered across regions and countries, placing more pressure on project managers to align all efforts regardless of where everyone is based.
The 6 essentials of effective project management
Six areas are particularly critical to project management, and all are covered in CCE’s introductory one-day project management course and various follow-up courses.
- Scope management – Stakeholders must first understand a project’s requirements and boundaries. Without such parameters, projects can expand unchecked, requiring everyone to complete more work within the same timeframe and with the same budget. This is called scope creep and is what causes an estimated 92 per cent of project failures.
- Schedule management – Timely completion is one of the greatest indicators of a project’s success. Project managers must learn to identify the path of a project, helping focus their energies on the time-critical activities rather than the urgent ones. Lacking awareness of schedule management is a common mistake in project management.
- Stakeholder engagement – A common misjudgement by inexperienced project managers is to focus purely on the tasks, rather than the human impact of change. However, people are critical to program success, and must be brought on the journey as early as possible. These stakeholders include senior decision-makers such as clients, sponsors and steering committees. They also include team members, who must be motivated and committed to the project over long periods.
- Communication management – Clear and timely communications are the lifeblood of stakeholder management. Project managers need to communicate clear roles and responsibilities, and get the right information to the right people the right way and at the right time. They must also be aware of potential barriers such as language, culture, style and physical or physiological differences.
- Leadership skills – Managing a project requires strong leadership skills, given the need for persuasion, motivation, decision-making, delegation, team building, conflict management and problem-solving skills at every step. Where are your existing strengths? Where are the gaps?
- Risk management – Finally, good project managers must learn to identify negative as well as positive risks, and to know the difference between risks and issues. This might involve running risk workshops, applying risk identification techniques, developing treatment strategies, and maintaining a risk register.
A one-day introductory course on project management will give your team an overview of the complexities behind each area. You can then decide to go back and do the masterclass, or explore individual topics in further detail. Stakeholder management, scoping and change management are three examples of topics that sometimes require a little more depth. As project management becomes more valued in almost any sector, it’s a skill worth developing.