The "toolbox" you have built on your honed skills is helping you to struggle with objectives, tasks, priorities, target dates….. What are those skills to help you thrive in Project Management and deliver Customer Value?
This is an adapted list from Josh Kaufmann, in my opinion, also aplicable to Project Management:
- Information-Assimilation to recognize the key Information.
- Communication to make your message understood by a targeted audience, both in written and verbal form.
- Mathematics to feel comfortable with numbers. To analyze and show budget status, forecasts, results, trends, among others.
- Decision-Making. How to identify critical issues, crítical paths, and handle ambiguity.
- Rapport. How to interact with other people in a way that encourages them to like, trust, and respect you.
- Conflict-Resolution to anticipate potential sources of conflict and resolve disagreements when they occur.
- Scenario-Generation. How to create, evaluate, and communicate a possible future scenario.
- Planning. How to identify the necessary next steps to achieve an objective, account for dependencies and use of contingencies.
- Self-Awareness to manage effectively your limited energy, willpower, and focus.
- Interrelation to recognize, understand, and make use of key features of systems and relationships within them. Systems thinking.
- Skill Acquisition to find and use available resources to learn. Forever.
Although Communication may seem underrated in relation to other skills, from the customers' point of view, it is the key to generate a real impact and built trust. Customers may expect to know the project goes on track. To foresee the forthcoming phases. To be confident about achieving the objectives on due time and form.
A customer's opinion about your good performance may be eroded due to poor communication.
And from your point of view, what are your key core skills? Should you develop any?
Today is the right moment to assess your core skills and design your personal self-training plan for the following weeks.
