Skills for the project manager

What skills must be developed for good project management?

1-Strategic skills

Projects are becoming increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Our ability to understand the context in which the project originated, the strategic objectives it will help to achieve, and the organizational environment in which the project will be carried out, are all notions that the project manager must master to make the right choices for realization!
To improve performance in creating value for the organization, it's essential to develop the skills needed to make strategic links within the industry context.

2-Technical skills

Adaptive, traditional, hybrid. What are they?
What are the winning conditions that will make us favor one approach over another? What tools will enable us to achieve adequate, realistic performance? The project manager needs to develop skills related to the specific aspects of project, program and portfolio management, to be able to determine the best approach for creating value.

3-Relationship skills

What posture to adopt and why?
How can we help our stakeholders to be collaborative?
How can we get our teams to be responsible and autonomous?
To achieve this, project managers need to develop the skills they need to motivate and guide their teams and stakeholders.

What principles guide PM behaviors?

The project manager is guided by 12 principles that identify certain key competencies, including :

Stewardship: to act responsibly to complete activities with integrity, care and reliability, while respecting internal and external constraints.

Leadership: to demonstrate and adapt leadership behaviors to meet individual and team needs.

Collaboration: recognize that project teams are made up of individuals with diverse skills, knowledge and experience, all of which are strengths in achieving common goals more effectively and efficiently than working alone.

Involve stakeholders in a proactive and measured way, to contribute to project success and customer satisfaction.

Value: continuously assess and adjust the project's alignment with business objectives and expected benefits and value.

Adaptation: design the project development approach according to the project context, objectives, stakeholders, governance and environment, using "just enough" processes to achieve the desired result while maximizing value, managing costs and improving speed.

Quality: maintain a focus on quality to produce results that meet project objectives and align with the needs, uses and acceptance requirements defined by the relevant stakeholders.

Risk: continuously assess exposure to risks, whether opportunities or threats, in order to maximize positive effects and minimize negative effects on the project and its outcomes.

Adaptability and resilience: integrate adaptability and resilience into the organization's and project team's approaches, to help the project adapt to change, recover from setbacks and advance the project's work.

Change: preparing the people involved to adopt and maintain new behaviors and processes, necessary for the transition between the current state and the anticipated future state created by the project's results.

Evaluate them, you say?

While technical or specialized skills are easy to display on a resume, the same cannot be said for interpersonal skills (or savoir-être), including those listed above. In this evolving context, the project manager becomes a project leader, with specific needs in terms of training and career planning.

How to assess project management skills

Psychometric assessment tools are available specifically for project management. They can be used to identify grey areas and gaps, so that a training plan can be drawn up to address them.
A different plan for everyone.

In addition to these individual training plans based on a diagnosis, it is also the project manager's responsibility to identify his or her shortcomings and take corrective action, for example, by ensuring that the appropriate training is taken!

Action plan

As with any objective, we need to define the current situation, specify the desired state and identify the actions required to achieve it, in line with the organization's strategic planning needs. This applies to both individual and group skills.

This approach to valuing talent is of course a tool for facilitating project delivery, but also for retaining staff. The latter can be sensitive to the efforts made to train them, invest in them and help them grow in their role, and enable them to realize their full potential within the company by putting their knowledge into practice.

In conclusion

The profile of the project manager has evolved considerably, from a role that emphasized technical skills, to one that favors behavioral and strategic skills. It is desirable to develop these skills.

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