You often hear that a Project Manager (PM) should be a leader with the necessary character traits and the desire to be first in everything. He should also be able to communicate, resolve disputes and conflicts, manage people, coordinate team activities, set goals and motivate people to achieve them, and much more. But all these skills are personal qualities, the so-called soft skills.
But despite innate or acquired qualities, PMs cannot do without hard skills. Below we will only talk about the technical skills of PMs.
Note: Project Manager and Project Administrator should not be confused.
What are hard Skills?
Hard skills are those vocational skills and competences that can be learned and, if desired, tested and measured.
Simple examples of such skills are the ability to drive a car (there are even state examinations for the theoretical and practical parts to test the quality), knowledge of applied mathematics, knowledge of one or more foreign languages, and many others.
All of these skills are easy to assess both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Hard skills are usually contrasted with soft skills, which cannot be measured or tested, or whose assessment is too subjective. These are usually personal qualities of an employee that are also very important at work: the ability to communicate, to resolve disputes and conflicts, to resist stress, to work hard, etc.
In general terms, soft skills are people skills.
On the one hand, almost all of a project manager’s skills are soft skills. On the other hand, if there are specific management techniques and working standards, then there is a fairly clear system of assessments and requirements.
You can read more about the role of a team leader here.
What kind of hard skills can a project manager have?
Do you know what the scariest thing about being a manager is? Routine. It is the most difficult, unavoidable and yet almost inevitable part of being a manager.
And it is the ability to get all the routine processes around you right that is the hard skill.
Typical situation
If a project team has been working successfully for a long time, it is likely to be using a framework or one of the popular project management methodologies. Even if it is not a pure methodology, but a kind of own set of several methodologies, this is already standardisation.
This means that most of the relationships within the team, as well as many of the business processes, are formalised. There are well-established algorithms for holding meetings, gathering customer requirements, controlling suppliers, etc. There are ready-made document forms for all these procedures, and specialised software (to-do and goal planner) is used for control and reporting.
At a certain level of project maturity, all of these business processes, which are largely handled by the manager, become routine.
When you are hired as a project manager in an established team, it is assumed that you know how to keep all the necessary documentation, how to use the relevant software, how to formulate tasks and KPIs correctly, and what types of reports and plans are required for a particular management methodology.
As well as being a leader and managing people, you need to be able to automate your work to ensure you achieve your goals quickly and safely.
Knowledge of common project management methodologies is a must
Not because you have heard of them or seen them working for competitors. No.
You need to know the basic principles and all the key mechanics:
- How and how often meetings are held.
- The cycles/iterations into which the work process is divided.
- How control is exercised (at the output stage, in parallel, working closely with customer representatives, etc.).
- How objectives are formulated and what criteria are used to evaluate the result.
- How planning is done. Which documents should be received at the output, with whom the plans are agreed, how and when they can be changed, etc.
Of course, it is impossible to learn all the management techniques by heart. You will need to refresh your knowledge from time to time and update it according to the internal systems available in each company or team. However, you should have a basic knowledge so that you can easily adapt and start some kind of base.
And if you don’t have a base, it will be difficult. There’s a good chance that you’ll be rejected at the interview stage because the time it takes to train you and get you into a full-time job is too expensive.
Alternatively, you could learn one or two of the most popular techniques in detail and look for work in companies and teams that use them.
An equally important skill is creating a list of requirements
The PM should know who and how the project requirements are formed, who the stakeholders are, in what format it is most convenient to store and collect data, and so on.
Of course, much will depend on the methodology used. Sometimes a user story is preferred, sometimes a plan for managing stakeholder expectations is preferred, sometimes a requirements plan is preferred, and so on.
But virtually every type of project uses much the same methods of describing and gathering requirements:
- interviews,
- questionnaires,
- questionnaires,
- brainstorming,
- Use-cases,
- User Story.
The PM should at least know and be able to work with these formats.
Project evaluation skills
What can be evaluated in a project? First of all, the client or customer is interested in the implementation time and the required budget. To get specific values that are as close to reality as possible, you need to be able to work with input data, know reasonable timelines for completing certain typical tasks, and be able to estimate the main and associated development costs.
Of course, you need to be able to relate time and cost to the output quality of the product.
If the project is new to you, you should be able to break it down into components that can be estimated with some confidence.
To make the estimate as accurate as possible, it is logical to use popular and long-established methods such as peer assessment, poker planning, parametric model, from particular to general, and others.
Planning Skills
The neater and more accurate the plan, the more realistic and accurate the result will be. It is impossible to work on a project without a plan.
A project manager should know: what types of planning there are, how they relate to project implementation, what data should be collected and obtained before making a plan, how and what can affect the result, what risks there may be and how to avoid them, how detailed tasks should be, how to decompose complex tasks, how to link plans to work cycles (iterations), and much more.
Equally important is the ability to use profile software for planning. This is one of the automated parts of a PM’s job. It’s one thing to be trained to work in a new environment, and another to hit the ground running.
And it’s also worth checking the new project manager’s prioritisation skills.
What exactly can be attributed to planning skills?
- Knowledge of basic planning and budgeting techniques.
- Ability to identify and evaluate key indicators.
- Ability to work with different types of plans (network plans, kanban, schedules, calendars, task hierarchy, etc.).
- Understand the techniques and methods used to optimise the timing of work (schedule compression).
- Understand how to track dynamics (linked to different metrics).
Risk management capabilities
The PM should be able to make a risk matrix, know all the main project risks (they will be typical for many projects in a particular business area), be able to react to these risks, track/monitor them, etc.
The PM should also know what management mistakes they can make and how to avoid them (gradation of project management mistakes).
Project Delivery Skill
This is a very interesting and important skill. Regardless of how the client’s representatives are involved in the project, you still have to complete it and deliver the results to the client.
Every project has a start and an end.
A competent PM should know how to automate the handover process: what documents need to be produced, who should sign them, what needs to be provided by them, where and how the necessary accesses are stored, how further support will be provided, whether there is documentation about the project and how it is maintained, etc.
The delivery phase of the project may include:
- Creation of a communication plan.
- Training the client’s representatives.
- Handover of project documentation.
- Signing the acceptance certificate.
- etc.
Summary of results
At first glance it may seem that a Project Manager should have mainly soft skills, but in reality many business processes often become routine. For example, a PM should be able to develop and maintain the necessary documentation, properly design and standardise management processes.
In this sense, soft skills easily fall into the ‘hard’ category. Therefore, when a PM is hired for a new project, he or she is expected to demonstrate qualifications, expertise and skills in planning, requirements gathering, risk management and handing over the project to the client.
