How To Improve Your Project Managing Skills
If your role involves managing projects or if you run your own business or are a freelancer or contractor, you’ll be used to managing several projects at the same time. Keeping on top of everything and ensuring the project is being kept to schedule and on budget is an art. If you feel you need to up your project managing skills, here are some effective tips that you can start to implement immediately
If your role involves managing projects or if you run your own business or are a freelancer or contractor, you’ll be used to managing several projects at the same time. Keeping on top of everything and ensuring the project is being kept to schedule and on budget is an art. If you feel you need to up your project managing skills, here are some effective tips that you can start to implement immediately:
Learn how to manage
Some people are natural leaders whilst others struggle to effectively manage a team. A project management course by Impact Factory shows you ways to improve your project management skills. The course focuses on the human aspect of project management and gives guidance on how to effectively manage people, how to give feedback and strategies you can use to stay on ahead if things do start to fall off the rails.
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Set clear deadlines
A project can start to fail or fall behind its schedule because of uncertainty with deadlines or a lack of understanding of the consequences of the project overrunning. This can sometimes happen if you’re working with a remote team, or if there are different organisations involved in completing the project. As a project manager it’s responsibility to ensure everyone is working to schedule and using a project management tool, like Asana or Trello, can take the hassle out of doing this.
Keep it simple
If you’re in charge of delivering the project by yourself, it can be extremely overwhelming thinking of everything that needs doing. Breaking the project down into smaller more manageable tasks, will make it easier. Again, a project management tool can be extremely useful, as you can visually plan out what task needs completing by when. And, as you work through each task you can track your progress and dedicate more time to it if needed.
Communication
Maintaining lines of clear and open communication is key to managing a project. It’s a good idea to get your team into the habit of checking status updates daily, so everyone is working to the same schedule. Using email for project management communication can become messy and time consuming. Whereas a project communication tool can streamline communication between teams. For example, Slack is an instant messaging tool that also allows document sharing. Or, if you need to frequently chat with team members, Skype enables video conference calls. It even has a translation service, which is amazing if you are speaking to people from a different country.
Pool your resources
Working efficiently means not wasting time searching and transferring files to colleagues. By using a file sharing system, either digital or physical, you are making better use of your time, but it also means valuable documents are less likely to get lost or misplaced. Google Drive or Dropbox are great examples of file sharing systems and they can be used across multiple devices like PC, Mac and mobile.
Improving your project managing skills will help you to communicate better, work more efficiently and achieve greater results.