Successful Project Management Strategies

The link between leadership and project management

The project leader is the central piece of a project. A leader will build the project plan, oversee its execution, and make critical decisions based on new inputs.

But besides all these technical actions, even more importantly, they will set up the project tone.

If an obstacle comes up in the middle of a project, or if the company’s priorities get changed, a leader will not only need to adapt and redo the project plan, but they’ll need to communicate it to the team members. They need to make sure that everyone understands the end goal, how the team will get there, and what the desired outcome is.

Nowadays, Data Analysis is a top tool for every project leader. Whenever a challenge comes up, or a risk is materialized, it is crucial for the leader to make fast and accurate decisions. With more data being in our hands every day, sometimes these decisions come easy to the leader, but these not only need to be right, they need to be communicated properly too.

And this is one of the main struggles for project leaders.

If a leader lacks communication with their team, imagine this example: their project gets abridged because it has a high impact. But the message the team receives is “We will have to complete all tasks in less time” without any context, or explaining how they will achieve this, the expected reaction is, well, negative.

But, if the message the team receives is “our project has been prioritized over other ones because it will make a high impact on customer satisfaction. We will have additional resources joining the team and this will contribute to the company’s main goals”. See the difference? In this situation, the expected reaction is quite the opposite: motivational and positive.

Key leadership skills for project success

As we mentioned above, technical key skills for success for any project leader are:

• Organization and prioritization
• Data Analysis
• Financial Management
• Risk Management

But soft skills are not important, they are indispensable for the success of the project. In the end, there will be a team who will be actually doing the job, so their morale, their motivation, and their knowledge of what needs to be done are crucial. Thus, a leader should develop as well these skills:

• Negotiation
• Problem Solving
• Decision Making
• Communication

Communicate Vision and Objectives

Now we’ll focus on a single skill, for which thousands of articles have been written as it’s one of the hardest to sharpen: communication.

As a project leader, you’ll be responsible for communicating all progress, risks, and statuses with different stakeholders that might or might not have different goals in mind. You’ll need to bring everyone on the same page to continue with the good progress.

Additionally, you’ll need to communicate with your team. Your team members will update you on their progress and the challenges they are facing, hoping you’ll be able to assist them. This is why it’s so important to foster an honest and positive relationship among team members.

But you’ll also need to communicate to them new updates or changes done to the project, maybe decided outside of the team itself. This is what presents a real challenge.

You need to communicate the same information to every team member and let them know about the updated goal and scope in a timely basis and how this will affect the whole project.

This is why I created ProjectOS Pro — it’s a Notion tool that allows businesses to create and track Objective and Key Results and here comes the crucial part: link them directly to projects.

This way, communicating the company’s vision and goals comes in handy and is easy for project leaders. But not only to the team. Stakeholders will be able to visualize project status, and goal progression and see any relevant changes.

As the project evolves, every team member will see to which objectives and how the project they’re working on is contributing to the priority of such objectives and their progress. I’m sharing the link at the end of the article.

Conclusion

As we went through the article, we focused on the importance of not only developing hard skills but especially, as a project manager, on the importance of team alignment and communication in the role of a leader for a project success.

Having a clear vision, shared goals, and understanding the contribution of each project to these objectives can bring the company’s vision to every team member and make the prioritization and communication process smooth and clear to everyone involved.

Here’s the link to get ProjectOS Pro if you’re interested in setting OKRs and seamlessly managing projects in your business:

https://bodegalaabs.gumroad.com/l/projectos-pro