Project Manager: Skills and Knowledge

Who is that person and why both of the project sides, team, and owner, believe every word of them? Nevertheless, as everything in the IT-sphere, this Project Manager phenomena can be explained.

We decided to do it on the blog by putting all tips and advice into one article that we made up together with ChallengeSoft Project Manager, Yulia Tsoma,

Who is a Project Manager

The basic descriptions of the Project Manager (PM) are:

the odd man out: the person that is a teammate but still at the higher step than you;
translator from tech to the human’s one: the person that does all conversation thing, because no one wants to disturb developers;
the parent: the only person that takes care of the team on every level (from emotional to professional).

And none of them are wrong… for 100%. However, every description has some points. Because PM is the person designated by the executing organization to lead the team and responsible for achieving the project objectives.

Some companies, take this person as a substitute for everyone: developer, QA, and even UI/UX Designer. However, Project Manager is not a universal soldier, it is a person who specializes in his field, namely in project management.

The task of the PM is to build the process of work on the project with the available resources within the allocated budget, defined terms, and with the agreed quality. So let’s take a closer look at it with recommendations from our Project Manager.

What is Like: Manage a Project. Recommendations from ChallengeSoft PM

Just to make it clear, we don’t want to feed you with another fairy tale about how hard is to be Project Manager, neither how easy it can be! We want to be honest with you. That’s why, we asked our teammate, PM Yulia Tsoma about her job and recommendation for everyone, who wants to be her colleague. So here are our questions and her professional responses that filled with experience.

Tell us about your most difficult experience and give advice on how to get out of such things.

The hardest thing is when you work with “I know better” type clients. The biggest problem is that this type doesn’t want to trust the team. Instead, they try to control every step, all actions, and of course that has had a very bad impact on the team, and on me.

All our ideas were simply not accepted, and every time this type of client will come up with something, but in the end, we still came back to one of our suggestions.

The solution is to work on increasing your client’s trust, though this is easier said than done because the process is quite painstaking.

Submit the work in stages, offer options explaining why, what, and how, and what will ultimately be the best, finally find analytics and share it with your client.

Give some advice for all the juniors for them to live their best life.

Well it’s all should be in them: proactivity, sharp mind, a little knowledge of psychology would be a plus. Don’t forget that you are on always ready mode to organize all the records and documents so that either they are at hand, or you know exactly where to find them quickly.

And don’t forget to take a break, because sometimes a non-working day can just get out of the way.

Don’t forget to never whine, even if the customer is hysterical, you should always be calm.

Steps of project managing

Another question to our Yulia was:” If project management could be divided into steps, what were these steps?”

Planning: work on the resource, communication with the client, and a lot of questions
Development of designs (though initially the frames)
Implementation of the project with solving urgent problems
Testing, testing, and testing after testing.
Releases, delivery of the project to the customer.

There is a lot to write here, but you can only understand it if you are inside the project and working on it from the very beginning until the final release, of course, including the period of the community).

Portrait of PM: Skills and Duties

What PM is Doing

Work with the client takes a lot of emotions, force, and time. It’s not overreacting at all! Project Managers keep the communication going with the client all the time to build the partnership. They also use reports in some kind as a tool for it and perform the features. It also about control of expectations from requirements and control of deadlines.

When it comes to the team, Project Managers are trying to do their best in informing of the team and keep them motivated and building effective engagement, without conflicts inside it. They trust teammates and ready to introduce them to the task, give some help, and do the workflow setting: development, testing, work with requirements.

The Project Manager is still working on the product too. It took a lot of experts’ effort to make the development and launch planning, breakdown into components, tasks, and subtasks and also, to do the appointment of performers. And it’s not even the end of PM for the product. They do performance monitoring and risk analysis, testing, and polish it all with documentation.

Project Managers can’t be without the company they represent. During the whole work process, PMs are always keeping in mind profit and meeting customer’s business goals on time and building trust. For the other party, company’s development team, PMs setup of the work process, do the planning of development and delivery along with summing up with reports.

Now, we gave you some thoughts to think, tips, and theory or how to be a g\more than just a good Project Manager. But still, you have some things to catch up! So, to summer things up, here are skills for Project Manager to Catch Up.