5 règles essentiels pour être chefs de projets. (Document en anglais)

5 Essential Rules for Project Leaders

Managing successful projects is vital to a successful career. These crucial skills help you get the job done.

15 June 2010

Managing successful projects is vital to a successful career. These crucial skills help you get the job done.

Project managers need a wide array of skills to get good results, but your ability to lead a project team is especially important. Without it, your relationships with executives, stakeholders and team members can turn dysfunctional. And that reflects badly on you — and your career.

Here are five rules no project leader should ignore:

1. Listen — No, Really Listen

The ability to truly listen to and understand others helps project managers build consensus and uncover confusion. But they also have to take in the bigger picture.

Paying attention to a person’s tone and asking questions allows project managers to avoid misunderstanding and conflict, says Nirav Patel, CAPM, project manager at IQR Consulting Pvt. Ltd, a technology solutions and business analytics company in Ahmedabad, India. And when you avoid discord with your team, you avoid tarnishing your career, too.

2. Build Relationships

Strong ties between senior management, team members and stakeholders are cornerstones of any successful project.

“If you are going to do projects well, you need people to do things willingly,” says Penny Pullan, PhD, PMP, founder, Making Projects Work Ltd., Leicestershire, England. “People take action if they trust and respect you and you trust and respect them.”

A solid relationship with your team also allows for more open cooperation, says Kareem Shaker, PMP, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

“Trust encourages [team members] to propose ideas, suggest ways to enhance work, speak of their concerns and give advice,” he says. “If they lack trust, people will think [twice] before embarking on any new thing, fearing they may be blamed or punished if things go wrong.”

3. Set Clear Priorities

Project managers must be able to convey goals, concerns, plans and priorities to the team.

“As project managers, we do have to direct the traffic,” says Deanne Earle, director of Unlike Before Ltd., a global consultancy near Cuneo, Italy. “Team members must know what it is they’re supposed to be doing.”

If you don’t make project priorities clear, you could put key milestones — and your job — at risk.

4. Facilitate Collaboration

Team members should be encouraged to cooperate and share information, ideas and assets to help each other. The result can be greater than the sum of its parts.

“When we collaborate we get the ‘one plus one equals three’ effect,” says Adam Michaelson, PMP, product manager at AtTask Inc., a project management software provider in Orem, Utah, USA. “Things happen that might not have if people had remained siloed and focused on their own work.”

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