How to become Proactive Project Manager?

To deliver a solution on schedule, on budget  and within project constraints, strong Project Management skills are essential. Project management is a process that combines a set of knowledge, skills and techniques to address and plan the tasks and activities required to meet the objective and goal of the project. Proactive Project manager must have knowledge, skills and technique to plan the tasks, to meet the objective and goals of the project.  Proactive Project manager may not guarantee you that you won’t have risks, unexpected issues or change in requirements in project but he/she will have better processes and plan in place to deal with all this unpredictable, hostile and crunch situations.

Proactive Project Manager should have the  following skill sets:

Effective communication:

Project  Manager spent 90% of his time on project planning and designing plan, communicating, organizing stating meeting and mitigating risks and issues, updates, status reports and courteous and effective email. Project Manager provides vision and direction to the team. In order to help him perform all the said activities proactively, Project Manager must have good written and verbal communication skills. He also needs to have good presentation skills. Sometimes,  Project Manager needs to give presentation to the client/project stakeholder/project team . He should be good at keeping his point across clearly.

You can read article on effective communication on the following link:

http://www.drbalternatives.com/articles/cc2.html

Strong Organizers:

Project Manager should be good at generating and keeping track of all project related documents that help him/her keep track of overall activities of the project. proactiveProject Manager needs to be aware of all the processes, which help him/her to monitor the progress of the project and deal with unpredictable issues, and ensure that project is in good health.

You can read good article on Organizing on the following link:

http://www.worklifecoach.com/ten_easy_organizing.pdf

Leading from front attitude:

Project team always looks to Project Manager for guidance, direction and decision making. Project manager  should have great leadership skills and he/she should lead from the front. People always like to work under hard working boss and respect him/her. PM should be a good listener and should know how to get things done by not putting extra pressure on team. He should make working on the project an enjoyable experience rather than making it mere tedious and lackluster job. He needs to have cool head for handling the things at crunch situation because If project manager get panic during hostile situation, it will have drastic impact on the morale of the team.

You can see more qualities of leadership at the following link:

http://www.girlscouts.org/for_adults/leader_magazine/2004_fall/five_qualities.asp

Problem Solving Skills:

Project Manager needs to have great problem solving abilities. He should have some knowledge of technology and should understand the domain and  business problem. Proactive Project Manager work on the problems and its solution and is not involved in finger pointing. This quality will help him to understand, assess and resolve project team ‘s issues and problem. He/She does  not wait for the problem to occur then fix it, he/she act proactively and foresee the problem well in advance and have plan in place to deal with them. He/She got to have a big picture of everything all the time.

You can read nice article on Problem Solving skills in details at the following link:

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_00.htm

Team Motivation:

A project has many activities. We needs role with responsibilities to perform day to day activities of the project. Needless to say, all roles needs to perform and contribute as per their responsibilities in order to make a project a big success. For example, role could be team lead, group lead, developer. If some of the role does not contribute well, project may have dire consequences. It is the responsibility of the Project Manager to keep on motivating his team. PM should give reward for team ‘s achievement. For example, PM may take team out for lunch/dinner. Believe me, it helps. Good PM should also provide honest feedback and give a challenges to the team. PM should make each team member feel  they are very important for the project and  adding value to the project and the organization.

You can read nice article on team building and motivation at the following link:

http://www.teambuildinginc.com/article_teammotivation.htm