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The Strategies of Successful Project Managers

January 22, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices

The Strategies of Successful Project Managers
By Richard Morreale

After over 35 years of experience working on and managing some of the largest, most visible projects in the world, I have come to the conclusion that successful Project Management has about 20% to do with hard skills dealing with Planning, Organizing, Monitoring and Controlling and about 80% to do with attitude and behaviors. In other words, success is more about how you tell ‘em than what you tell ‘em.

Don’t get me wrong here. I do believe that you must have the 20% in place. I am a firm believer in hard skill processes, procedures, plans and controls. It’s just that I believe, from experience and from interviewing and modeling other successful Project Managers that the bigger part of the success equation is attitudes and behaviors. Things such as, enthusiasm, energy, commitment to excellence, commitment to success, sense of humor, communication, honesty, openness, self-motivation, the ability to motivate others, etc. Put these attitudes and behaviors with the hard skills and you become a formidable opponent of the failed project.

During all of those years dealing with project managers and then running projects myself, I have also come to the conclusion that very successful project managers put 8 strategies in place on their projects and that these strategies help them to be successful. Let’s look at a top-level view of these Strategies:

  1. Know Your Outcome - Know what you want to achieve before you start working on achieving it.
  2. Plan/Schedule the Achievement - Start using success words such as achievement, success, completion, etc. and also make sure you have a detailed plan/schedule in place for achieving the outcome.
  3. Organize for Success - There’s that success word again. Plus you must organize you, your team, and all others that you are dependent on for successful achievement of your outcome into a viable organization relating to the Plan.
  4. Gain and Maintain Commitment - Rather than just jumping into the work necessary to achieve the outcome, I suggest that you ensure that all who need to be committed to the Achievement Plan are committed and you have a strategy in place to keep them committed.
  5. Take Massive Action - Once the Outcome is known, the Plan is prepared, the Organization is in place, the people are committed you must take massive action to your plan. Action does not necessarily equal achievement. However, massive action to the plan does.
  6. Monitor and Control Achievement - As you take massive action to the plan you must ensure that you are monitoring achievement and, if required, making changes to the plan. In addition, it is highly important that you have the necessary controls in place to handle changes, risks, issues, etc. that could affect achievement.
  7. Stay Focused - It is extremely important that you remain focused on delivery of the outcome in accordance with the way in which achievement has been planned. However, if changes are required, make them and then re-focus on the new Outcome or the new Plan.
  8. Have Fun - Having fun is certainly one of the key strategies for Project success. When people are enjoying themselves they are much more productive.

Put these strategies in place on the next project you manage. Spend a lot of your time developing your soft skills as well as you hard skills and you will have a much greater chance for success.

Richard Morreale is a professional speaker, trainer, author and project management consultant. His latest book, Over 50 Killer Ideas for Delivering Successful Projects can be purchased on http://www.mmpubs.com

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 and is filed under Project Management Best Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 person has left a comment

A great article. Simple yet clear top-level behavioral must-have attributes for a good Project Manager. As a novice/young PM, still learning the ropes, I can recall something I read in Life’s Little Instruction book. “80% of all your success will depend on your ability to deal with people.” So it’s really inspiring that the an experienced PM like yourself highlights the importance of these qualities along side the tools, techniques, and process for managing a project. Look forward to reading more.

Sean Bernardino wrote on January 23, 2009 - 1:33 am | Visit Link

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