A good software skills for project managers list is INVALUABLE. Once you understand what software skills are important as a project manager, you’ll have a way to not just get the job, but also to continually advance your career. In this post, I’ll cover some of the best hard skills that every project manager should focus on developing.
Software skills for project managers are important to have. A lot of project managers aren’t software specialists and may not feel confident in the areas which make up these software skills. Some people think that certain skills are only needed by certain types of software, but this isn’t the case. It’s important to know what every project manager needs to know and learn them now.
1. Knowledge of Project Management Methodologies
A project manager needs to know about the different project management methodologies that exist. That doesn’t mean that you need to be an expert in all of them, as they usually are industry-specific and require certification. Here are some of the most common project management methodologies.
If you want to learn more about these and other approaches, check out our project management methodologies blog.
Pro Tip: As a project manager, you should be familiar with the project management knowledge areas and project management process groups defined by the project management institute (PMI).
2. Proficient with Project Management Software
Having a working knowledge of project management software is a must-have technical skill for project managers in today’s world. There are many project management software alternatives available in the market, so you’ll need to determine which project management tools and features are best for you and your team’s workflow.
3. Team Management
Project management is about teamwork. Project managers must have people skills to keep their teams working productively. That means understanding conflict management to keep everyone working together and morale high. It’s always helpful to start projects with team-building activities to help create relationships that will stick through the thick and thin of a project.
4. Time Management
Time is one of the triple constraints and one of the most important technical skills. Not having time management skills can lead to delays and worse. Project management is about meeting deadlines and getting your deliverables out on time. Project managers have to be experts in managing their time, their team’s time and the overall time of the project.
5. Project Planning
Project planning is a must-have project management skill because a project plan is the foundation of the project management cycle. It includes the project schedule, resources and costs. Traditional project management is all about planning ahead. Therefore, the planning stage of any project lays the foundation for everything that follows, including the success or failure of the project.
6. Project Scheduling
The project scheduling process is a vital part when writing your project plan. A project schedule organizes tasks, teams and time to complete a project. When people think about a project management skill, they’re probably thinking about project scheduling, deadlines and deliverables. But project scheduling is more than that, as it also involves resource management and risk management.
There are many tools that can help with this process, chief among them an online Gantt chart, which provides a visual of the schedule with tasks, durations of those tasks, dependencies, and milestones.
Not all Gantt chart software is as robust as ProjectManager. Our tool will do all the above, but unlike competitors, we can automatically calculate the critical path and then you can set a baseline. Now you’re ready to monitor planned versus actual effort and catch discrepancies with your schedule and budget. Don’t you want a Gantt chart that can do more? Get started for free today.
7. Project Budgeting
The project budget is the fuel that drives the project. Project management is all concept and no action without a project budget. But having a project budget is one one side of the project budgeting coin. There’s also budget management, which means tracking costs throughout the life cycle of the project and making sure your actual costs don’t exceed your planned budget.
8. Risk Management
Planning a project, big or small, is inherent with risk. Before executing the project, you have to create a risk management plan to identify, assess, and control risk. The more you can manage risk, the more likely your project is going to succeed.
9. Cost Management
Projects cost money. Creating a budget is part of the planning stage of project management. Once you have a project budget you have to use budget management to make sure that you control your costs through the execution stage.
10. Task Management
Tasks are little jobs that make up the execution phase of project management. They need to be created, organized, assigned to team members and tracked to make sure they meet the project constraints. This is done with task management. Project management software helps you manage tasks and fosters collaboration among your project team.
ProjectManager supersizes the limited features of most to-do software tools and gives you more task management tools. You can use Gantt charts, kanban boards, task lists and project calendars to manage your projects.
11. Broad Meeting Management Skills
Today’s IT projects can involve personnel from around the globe. Project meetings can be a combination of in-person, audio and video connections and may require coordinating schedules that may be 12 hours out of phase with the project location. The project manager needs to be able to work with the geographic disparity, different work cycles sometimes forcing delays in communication and even cultural differences in understanding what has been agreed upon and how work should proceed.
12. IT Quality Management Metrics
An important part of any IT project is the quality metrics that the resulting systems will meet. The PM should understand what those metrics are and how the systems and software are designed to meet them. Savings in the wrong part of the project could make a much bigger difference than anticipated when it comes time to test performance — for example, failure to inspect network cable to ensure it is not substandard could result in storage underperformance at a later date or web server unreliability.
13. Earning Respect: Make Difficult Decisions
The PM should have a reputation for making difficult, well-informed decisions. This will help the PM earn trust of both management and technical contributors. Especially valuable PMs with problem solving skills can step back and look at the big picture, finding a creative solution to intractable complication.
14. Roadmap-Oriented
The PM should have the company’s IT roadmap at hand, even if this project is a small or isolated part of the whole. Understanding the company’s technological philosophies and goals and the ways the current project life cycle might affect future directions can help to advocate for the project with management at important times.
15. Stay Detail-oriented but Big-picture Focused
Platform to master: monday.com
You know the saying about missing the trees for the forest and the forest for the trees. Developing that zoom in and then zoom out skill is a must for any digital project manager, especially one looking to move up in their role.
The reason for this disparity all boils down to one thing — we all have preferences in how we see information. To keep your project binoculars in focus, having a visual project management tool that lets you visual your work your way can help.
With monday.com Work OS, you can manage a unique workspace for large scale projects so that nothing gets lost in the mix, as well as nifty boards to manage any sort of project workflow.
Make a high level board to keep tabs on the big picture. For example, for our annual user conference, Elevate, we made a high level board to help stakeholders see who’s accountable for what element of the event, their timeline, and overall status for each aspect of the event.
If you’re got details to manage, monday.com’s project management software makes it just as easy to create unique boards for each micro team’s work relating to the project.
Going back to Elevate, for example, we made tons of boards to project manage (and master) every element of the event. Like an email board mapping out the content, design, and ops for all event communications and a speaker opportunities board showing a waterfall workflow from speaking candidates, opportunities, to the final lineup with their presentations.
Pro tip: Get started for free with a project management template and simply customize it to your core team’s needs as you go.
16. Create Visually Appealing Decks
Platform to master: Google Slides and Prezi
As a digital project manager, you’re likely working with a number of stakeholders who are likely in the weeds of more than just your project. So it’s super important to be respectful of their time while still getting your message across effectively.
That’s where clear, concise, and visual communication comes in. Use a tool like Google Slides or Prezi at weekly or daily meetings to review goals, progress, roadblocks, and action items.
While you might not be a designer or feel you have time to make everything look perfect, here are some simple steps to get the job done.
- Brainstorm: Try to think through template slides you know you’ll use repeatedly — be it for iteration meetings or sprint retrospectives.
- Plan: build your slides’ layouts and add your brand colors for a cohesive look and feel.
- Optimize: Send them off to a designer at your company who wouldn’t mind spending 10 minutes tightening them up.
- Reuse: Quickly edit your slides week to week feeling confident that you’ve got all the essential info already for you to present in style.
Pro tip: Send the slide deck out to the team after each meeting so they can easily reference it later.
17. Speak in the Same Language as Developers
Platform to master: Trick question, none!
Being a coder of any sort is generally not on a digital project manager job description. That being said, having a solid understanding of R&D terminology will be key. What’s a framework? When would someone use React over Angular? Is infrastructure and the cloud the same thing?
If you want to work closely with developers, understand their needs, and spot where you may need to bring on more R&D team members to get a project done — speaking their lingo is a great place to start.
Pro tip: Check out this video on the A-Z of computer science terminology. It can help you lay the groundwork for how to talk the talk with engineers who don’t have time to “translate” their vernacular. When they see you’ve made the effort, you’ll get serious credit in their book.
18. Collect Feedback Well and Collect Feedback Often
Platform to master: Typeform
No matter what project management methodologies you use, feedback is the key ingredient that makes team building more successful—it’s a way to
- check in and get a pulse on the group
- help team members feel heard
- mitigate risks within the team
Having digital products like quick surveys can make it easy to collect and analyze that feedback to help you ensure everyone stays on track.
While there are a lot of survey platforms out there, a simple Typeform form can usually do the trick. Keep your surveys short to ensure that people are able to fill them out in less than a minute. You can always do a pulse check-in week-to-week, and add a more comprehensive feedback form for your project retros.
Pro tip: Allow respondents to either add their name or stay anonymous if they prefer.
Conclusion:
Everyone is interested in knowing about software skills for project managers. And with good reason! The world of project management and software can be exciting, complex, and often daunting. Even experienced Project Managers can get confused between the two sometimes. And this confusion results in unclear communication between the two disciplines. We need to know how to better use both these areas if we want our projects to succeed!