This is the third in our series: Five Vital Skills for Project Managers – Organisation. We have previously talked about Communication and Leadership. Today we will explore the need for strong Organisational Skills.
Most of us do not have the luxury of being able to dedicate all our time to manage a project. Organisational skills are especially vital when you need to balance the demands of a project with everyday business-as-usual tasks. This is also the case when managing multiple projects.
Plan to succeed
The key to a successful project is in the planning. This includes understanding how to break down your project into manageable tasks and to create and monitor schedules. It also helps you delegate to the right people and to multitask. In short, Project Managers need to learn to juggle!
Here are some tips to help you stay on top of things:
- Designate one place to house all your projects
To give all stakeholders easy access the information they need, keep all of your team’s projects in the same place. This will help create visibility across the project so that if you are unavailable, the project will not be delayed for lack of information.
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Prioritise the work that will make the most impact
Prioritising both project tasks and business-as-usual (BAU) will help you to focus on what has the most impact for the business. The Urgent vs Important prioritising matrix is a powerful productivity tool that will have an immediate effect. To be proactive, a Project Manager needs to take a bird’s eye view of all the work to be able to quickly shift priorities.
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Enable your team to be flexible when priorities change
When priorities shift between projects and BAU, you will need to reassign tasks. This will require your team to be flexible so that they are able to refocus quickly. As a Project Manager, you need to provide them with the skills and support they need to do this effectively. You will need to balance workloads and have a way to measure workloads across projects and BAU.
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Schedule projects to maximize team productivity
When Project schedules and BAU are not coordinated, people get overbooked, work gets blocked, and projects get delayed. When creating your project schedule, it is vital to consider what else is happening so that work can run smoothly. A Project Manager needs to negotiate the project deadlines at the outset, to ensure that neither BAU nor the project suffers as a result.
As a Project Manager, juggling your Project and BAU is often a reality of the job. Hopefully, these tips will help you keep track of all your moving pieces, stay organized, hit your deadlines, and achieve your goals—every time. This concludes our look at Five Vital Skills for Project Managers – Organisation.
If you want to learn more, please take a look at our Project Management and Time Management courses.