How can I be a more effective project manager?

Being an effective project manager relies on following some form of guidance, but a key attribute of a good project manager is adapting this guidance to your environment. Making sure you have the right guidance to follow and being able to use it effectively is only part of the challenge.

As an effective project manager, rather than searching for a specific solution to every predicament you’ll take the guidance you may have at your disposal and adapt it to your project needs. This advocates a more generic set of skills for an effective project manager – flexibility, adaptability, negotiation, creativeness and influencing, to name but a few.

These are just some of the factors we think are needed to be an effective project manager:

• Guidance – some form of project management methodology such as the industry standard PRINCE2®
• Experience
• Skills – both technical and people-orientated skills
• Support – a community of mentors, resources and opportunity for discussion and debate is crucial to ensuring project management remains effective within an organisation.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all of this existed in one place? The debate will continue about how experience can be obtained – one quote we’ve come across says: “We can teach from our experience, but we cannot teach experience”. Whether you agree with this or not, our view is that what can be done is to provide opportunities for people to practice skills and gain ‘experience’ that way.

You can get guidance from a PRINCE2 Foundation & Practitioner course, which will equip you with the industry-leading, de-facto standard project management methodology. The PRINCE2 Plus package also provides the experience and support.