During the transition to the 21st-century tech storm, a project manager has increasingly had to deal with new challenges in managing project portfolios in the software development pipeline. Moreover, project managers are known to work on more than one project simultaneously. As a result, the role of project management has become more prominent in 2021.
Today, to make an impression as a project manager, you need to be a strategic business partner who believes in organizational success and copes with inevitable setbacks.
This post will discuss how to exploit the manager's role to make your project successful. Enjoy!
Program Management vs. Project Management
Understanding the difference between program and project management is the first step to becoming a successful project manager. Today, project management is more tactical, involving checking off things as they are done, on time, and under a budget.
While it's undoubtedly essential to have this skill set, program management can strategically look at the project in multiple workstreams.
To be successful, if you oversee a technology transformation, think about yourself as a program manager of the overall activity that includes a heavy technological component. Thus, there could be other workstreams that you need to manage outside of the technical scope.
For example, managing organizational change, architecture integrations, improving processes, aligning an overall strategy, and other aspects are essential for a successful transformation. Therefore, when you consider your position and where you devote your time and effort, it's important to think of things in a broader sense than just project management concepts.
Learn more about the differences between a product manager and a project manager on our blog.
Top 5 Desirable Qualities in a Good Project Manager
1. Effective Risk Management
Proactively mitigating instead of reactively responding is what makes a project successful.
When it comes to managing minor problems and other issues that may derail the project, a project manager has a lead role in ensuring project success. A significant part of it encompasses risk management, which means identifying risks that come up during project initiation and the ability to plan alternatives.
Moreover, an effective manager learns from past mistakes to ensure that the same problems don't hamper the next endeavor. By staying in the same rut, you end up having even more unsuccessful deliveries.
As a project manager, you must be able to implement your learning, communication, and leadership style and plan accordingly.
2. Effective Implementation of Agile and Scrum Methodologies
Managing projects is a continuous learning process like any other field requiring knowledge expansion and exploring new opportunities. Therefore, a basic understanding of the agile methodology and software tools and techniques is necessary for managers who interact with software developers.
In addition, there is often technical language being thrown around during meetings, so the manager needs to know the basics to communicate the requirements effectively. While you will find a few project managers who will have all the basics right and have a solid conceptual understanding, you will often find project managers who have hands-on experience with programming.
These people tend to be the best project managers. They have ample technical knowledge and can negotiate, advise, and be proactive when interacting with their team and their clients.
Our expertise in both, technical and non-technical methods, enables us to interpret project requirements effectively at Cubix. We assign a product manager and a project manager on every project, and include the client early on. With this, every project can be conceptualized beforehand with a strategist.
"Making clients part of your process will improve things." Salman Lakhani-CEO, Cubix
3. Keeping Team Morale High
A perfect project manager ensures that enthusiasm and motivation are maintained throughout the process. Managers are responsible for ensuring that team members know what goals they are expected to achieve. Knowing your team's strengths and weaknesses and then determining how to utilize them efficiently is pivotal.
4. Excellent Communicator
As the saying goes, communication is key.
Effective project success requires verbal and non-verbal communication concerning the project's goals, expectations, and constraints so that you can give constructive feedback to your team. Also, project success depends on comprehensive interaction to ensure everyone is on the same page.
5. Integrity
Some may wonder how integrity is a must-have skill; well, actually, it's a virtue, and every junior and senior manager must have it. It helps each individual to set an example for the entire team, and it compels them to follow that example. Additionally, integrity fosters an environment of trust and reliability.
What is the Role of a Project Manager in Software Development Company?
Project managers have many detailed tasks to perform as they have to juggle many things. Although it's challenging to identify one specific thing you are responsible for, we have covered the top role of a project manager so far.
So, let's use Cubix as an example to illustrate the leading role of a project manager.
The project manager is responsible for:
Supporting the Product Owner
A project manager is additionally responsible for supporting the product owner. The role includes:
Demonstrating Business Leadership
A business leader augments functional capabilities and hands-on expertise you already have or are developing, with a more prominent strategic view of your organization, which customer or client might be accomplishing.
A clear understanding of the business's direction and future, rather than focusing exclusively on technology, is a critical skill that managers may lack. Strategic project management must also tie into the overall business plan. Thus, the more knowledge and experience you gain on the business side, the better your project manager is.
Leveraging Rhythm
Just picture having established your baseline, and your team has begun its first set of tasks. The time has come to set up a few fundamental activities or a rhythm for the project's success.
How do you Manage Rhythm in Projects?
Making it part of the Plan: Using Rhythm (a tool) for managing projects allows your team to prioritize tasks.
Connected Comments: Rhythm gives you the option of viewing all relevant comments right on the project detail rather than digging through emails. In this way, you never have to worry about not communicating something to the right person; everything is easily visible to the entire team.
Also, you can use comments in Rhythm to discuss weekly updates or whenever something comes up that needs to be clarified about the project, and all the discussion is captured directly in Rhythm.
Organize actions: Managing timelines are challenging because so many steps are involved in each task. If you don't have the tools in place to manage the deadlines, meeting deadlines can be challenging.
The role of a project manager is to manage the process and hold staff accountable for getting issues resolved. Therefore, you should also maintain a file detailing the problems so the team can review topics and their resolutions even if they are unable to attend status meetings.
After establishing these fundamental activities, you can move on to executing your project.
Recognize Quality Over Checklist:
Preparing checklists helps to figure out the resources that will be required, especially when you are bombarded with many tasks approaching their deadlines. Having an organized list of things to do will secure your project's success with minimal effort.
Also, project management tools such as Slack, Zapier, Git, Trello, Toggl, Bitbucket, etc., enable organizations to fulfill milestones on time. We recently shared a document for project management tools that you can explore.
Work through Gray Areas
All the attributes mentioned above speak for themselves, but what truly matters is working in the gray areas. Every project has certain gray areas that need clarity. They must be identified early to establish solutions and reduce unpredictability.
What makes a project fail?
Lack of resource planning
Suppose you've planned timelines, meetings, structures, themes, and the all-encompassing interface, but resource planning may be lacking. It is common for project managers to overlook the importance of this part during the planning process. So, 'why do projects fail?
We believe every organization should have the answer. The next time you start a new project, consider asking a few questions to plan other resources.
Project Management Guide in 2021:
Want to know about the project manager job scope?
A project manager can
By 2027, employers will need 87.7 million people with project management-related skills. It's exciting to see such an opportunity on the horizon and the growth opportunities it brings to managers. As a result, more and more people are exploring the project management career path and looking for new ways to get into it.
Amazing! How can I become a project manager?
Whoa, slow down there.
Is a degree necessary to step into project management?
Not necessarily.
Should you have project management experience?
Of course, you do.
It is all about gaining real-world project management experience that can lead to becoming a project manager without a degree; you can:
Let's Kickstart Your Project!
It may be challenging to find a formidable combination of high technical and high people skills in a person, but with the right support, you can produce outstanding results.
We hope you find this post interesting. You can discuss your project with Cubix, an app development company that can help you succeed. Also, keep an eye out for our new blogs this fall.
