Identifying Critical Leadership Of Project Managers: A Reflective Essay.

A Student's Point of View on Project Management

Discuss About The Identifying Critical Leadership Of Project Managers.

The job role of a project manager is critical since he or she forms the pint of contact between the higher authorities, the client and the project team. It is not an easy job as there are manifold aspects in the job of a project manager to ideally progress with a project fulfilling all the needs of the client. The project should be run keeping in mind; the budget the organization can management keeping it at the minimum and the implementation of the proper team in delivering the task requirements (Aga, Noorderhaven and Vallejo 2016). The following reflective assessment would thus present a learning outcome of what does it require to be an ideal project manager. This would be done in the following process. At first the assessment would come across a student’s point of view about the job role of a project manager depending upon his or her previous experience of handling a project. Next, the assessment focuses on the concepts and the principles of a project manager’s task, which includes the understanding of a project manager’s work role according to the module concepts and the ideas and insights linking the theories of these concepts, which enables a project manager to work more effectively. The next part of the reflective assessment focuses on the key learning points and actions to be taken by a project manager to identify the potential routes for implementing the ideas to progress effectively and productively with any task. In the end, the reflective assessment focuses on the process of preparing the reflective essay and the experience that has been obtained while the process.

At the beginning of a student life, project management ideas seldom cross the mind. However, the general principle of being a project manager is of the person responsible to deliver a particular project. I have come across several insights about the role of a project manager and have found that it is the responsibility of the project manager to bridge the gap between a client, the business organization and the project team. The assessment of any project is of utmost necessity, since they determine the propagation of a project. Since my learning has reflected that a project manager interfaces between the various ends of a project, the assessment of the progress of a project should also be imposed to a project manager as well (Ballesteros and Chavarria 2016). Nevertheless, it is still a questionable issue for me, if the traditional methods of assessments could be applicable to the current project management arena. Therefore, it is our responsibility to be clear about the strategic project assessment implementations based on the experiences of handling a project.

Key Principles and Concepts of Project Management

In addition, as a student, the projects that we handle are not evaluated on a professional level, though the approach should be professional. This approach changes after entering the professional zone. During the student life however, all the projects that a person comes across should be progressed through a professional approach. Primarily, it is essential that a project manager should maintain the appropriate standards of design and development of a project. Even while developing a project as a student, this strategy must be sustained. Another responsibility of the project manager is to manage the production of the deliverables in a project (Barry 2015). While developing a project as a student as well, it is required to keep a track on the rate of production of the required deliverables. After studying several journals on the role of a project manager, in my estimation, it is also the responsibility of a project manager to assess the risks arising with the implementation of the strategies to progress through the project. The experiences as a student have raised the idea of risk assessment in my mind. This is because; I have seen that due to poor implementation of risk assessment, hazards have caused havoc on a project. Risk assessments are done to generate strategies in eliminating the hazards that may form an obstacle in the progress of the project. I have also come across ideas that special exception cases have come across the path of progressing seamlessly through a project (Takey and de Carvalho 2015). Therefore, the experiences acquired through previous project management and the studies after have provided a view for the role of a project manager in handling exceptions. It is necessary that a project manager prepare risk assessment and eventuality plans to avoid any problems in future that have the ability to halt the project.

Ideally, it is the duty of a project manager to have a close look that every task allocated must be assessed so that the effective evaluation is done about the progress of the project.

There are certain modules and principles that a project manager has to follow in his or her career span. In consistent with a job role of a project manager, there are thirty modules present in total for the principal concepts of the job description of a project manager (Binder 2016). These thirty modules can be grouped into three categories of technical skills, strategic awareness and behavioural competency. These modules can be described in details as below:

Key Learning Points and Actions for Project Managers

Technical Skills of a Project Manager: It is the responsibility of a project manager to have the ability to handle a project. However, it is also required for a project manager to have technical skills in competence to the project he or she has to handle (Block 2016). This is because; a project manager is responsible to bridge the gap between a team, higher authorities and the clients. It is essential that a project manager possesses the hard skills of technical abilities along with the soft skills of leadership, communication and management. These hard skills call for a project manager to have the technical skills for creating a budget and finance estimation before a project is commenced. This includes his or her assistance in preparing a budget plan and identifying any variants in the process throughout. The project manager should be ready to adjust the sum whenever needed and keeping every minute record required through the project runtime (Schwalbe 2015). It is the responsibility of a project manager to provide absolute accuracy in this regard, as this also includes calculating the wages of the workers perfectly so that the flow of work is not compromised in any aspect. The project manager should have the ability to schedule the respective works depending on the time span of the project. This ensures the timely completion of any project. To prepare a flawless work schedule, the project manager should have the technical skills to handle the work-schedule software assistants, which ensures effective direction of workflow (Bredillet, Tywoniak and Dwivedula 2015). In addition to this, the project manager should have ample knowledge about the risk management reports of a particular project. Overall management report can be prepared by completely analysing and calculating the variants of a project. It even includes having the technical skills of analysing the insurance policies required for a project if any such situation occurs. Understanding the technical aspect needed for a particular project is the responsibility of a project manager.

Strategic Awareness: It is essential to understand for a project manager that a project without a proper strategy is as good as a derailed train. Personally realising a company strategy is indispensable for a project manager. In any way, a project and the company strategies are interconnected. It is possible that a company strategy may be wrong in ethical terms or it may even be possible that a project is following a wrongly implemented strategy. Bringing about that change in the company strategy to make a project following ethical strategy structures is the responsibility of a project manager (Carvalho and Rabechini Junior 2015). In fact, the project managers become the strategic planning in this regard for the company as well as the project. It is required that the project managers engage the pool of resources including the managers, project managers and the team leads that are engaged in the project tasks objectives. It is often found that implementation of the stakeholders who can provide beneficial strategic inputs for a project, and if not included, it may lead to general misunderstandings amongst the stakeholders. This may result to inefficiency in achieving strategic goals. This goal is achievable based on an effective communication between the stakeholders. A project manager often faces the challenges of miscommunications as many low-level employees live on the idea that communication is basic on only the higher-level workforce in a project (Cleden 2017). The knowledge gap thus prevails in an entire team that manages a particular project. Translating a process, delegating a business unit, organizing functions and translating vision and missions to every stakeholder in the project is the responsibility of a project manager (Bredillet, Tywoniak and Dwivedula 2015). A cycle of back and forth communication for the unanimous agreement of the stakeholders is necessary to implement. In addition, a project manager is required to create a perfect controlling system and project portfolio reporting system to implement during a project to make sure that the original strategy is being followed and the project is heading on the correct direction. This reporting should be done on multilevel and multidirectional way.

Preparing Reflective Essays

Behavioural competencies: Behavioural competency depends on three dimensions. They are knowledge, performance and personal behaviour. As described in the Guide to the Project Management Book of Knowledge or PMBOK, personal competencies are further divisible into the areas of human service, cognitive, personal effectiveness, impact, influence, action and achievements (Martinelli and Milosevic 2016). These are generally categorized as the soft skills of a project manager. The communication and consultation of a project manager is of utmost regard in this matter. The project manager should have the openness and honesty that would enable the low-level employees to interact with the project manager as well as all the stakeholders in the project. The project manager should have that ability to manage a conflicting or crisis situation with ease. For instance, if there is a situation that initiates differences between the project stakeholders, that has the potential to generate destructive issues, it is the responsibility of the project manager to analyse the entire scenario and listen to the point of views for every member involved in the project. In addition, the project manager should diffuse the issue to ensure maximum crisis management. It can be found that in some situations, two projects can simultaneously be working under the same concept. A project manager should have that flexibility and creativity to make out original and innovative ways to approach both the issues but both the approaches should be different from each other. However, amongst everything else, a project manager should focus on their leadership qualities (Sunindijo 2015). A leader is someone who should inspire people to follow his ideals and in project management, it depends on perceiving the ideals and direction of the project and influencing the entire team to follow the same path to complete the task in an effective manner. Along with all of these soft skills, a project manager should work on expanding his or her zone of expertise by self-learning and development, effective organizational values and necessary problem solving and decision-making abilities.

In the contemporary technically advanced world, it is necessary that a project manager should keep updating the skills and technologies while going on with their day-to-day works. Primarily, a project manager is supposed to acquire skill sets of a collaborative approach, improving productivity and managing the budget and time span of the project (Zhao, Hwang and Lee 2016). After the assessment of the ideals that have been come across, it can be said that there are many ways, in which a project manager can improve their skills and abilities. These ideas and insights on a project manager’s improvement skills are to be described as below.

Technical Skills of a Project Manager

A project manager needs to facilitate communication effectively amongst all the levels of a project management team. This includes all the minute details about a project work involving the stakeholders of a project (Turner 2016). It is necessary for a project manager to take a note of every discomfort a stakeholder is facing as the project progresses with respect to its timeline. The necessity of an effective communication is not only to generate effective communication but also to understand the communication gap and knowledge transfer problems as well as the problems every stakeholder faces during the project progression. In any case, the communication must stay intact, through every possible tool for facilitating it. These tools would include the emails, the status reports, the meeting and the project plans. As the job role of a project manager suggest, the line of communication within a project management team should be kept intact.

After thoroughly assessing the task of a project manager, it is very necessary for a project manager to make the entire team of stakeholders be clear about the project ideals and expectations (Lock 2017). It can be a negative impact on a project stakeholder to be surprised about the project manager’s plan on executing innovative ideas in a project plan midway. A project manager should always put a plan of communication and have a method to measure its effectiveness time to time throughout the runtime of the entire project. In estimation, it has been found that a huge number of economies are wasted on the estimated meeting performed all throughout the project timeline. It generally happens due to the knowledge gap between the stakeholders of a particular project (Kiu et al. 2017). It is necessary to effectively implement the communication in a project plan such that the meetings are less in number and shortened in timings. The amenities needed for a meeting can be cut down and it would benefit the estimated budget for a project. This is the responsibility of a project manager to implement this practise within a team managing a project. In addition, innovative ideas can also be added to the project timeline for meetings. This can be done by conducting a meeting through the utilization of Google Hangouts (Meng and Boyd 2017). A project manager is expected to have hard technical skills as well as effective soft skills to maintain the project work progress smoothly. The skill level includes having a empathetic but ethical eye of viewing and ear of listening. A project manager only becomes great when he has a good ear to listen to the perspectives of every stakeholder, teammates and the product owners as well being completely unbiased of his or her own thinking about the person or the situation. It is necessary that a project manager understands the client needs perfectly and be able to convey the same to everybody involved in the project. Filtering out the irrelevant information is also needed to be done by a project manager.

Strategic Awareness of a Project Manager

A project manager is to have a clear view of the project to be done and should be ready to take up any issues by summarizing the needs of everyone involved in the project. It is necessary to not only implement ideas of own in a project but t listen to all the others as well. This includes listening to the higher authorities and making them understand the project progression in a different approach. It may be possible that there is a point of discomfort between a project manager, the project team and the higher authorities (Kerzner and Kerzner 2017). The project manager has the onus to make the higher authorities understand the situation and the point of view of the team without antagonizing them. This is to be done by communicating in the language of the project manager that is by showing the point of view of the others through the point of view of the higher authorities (Ramazani and Jergeas 2015). Therefore, it is necessary that a project manager should keep the communication as random and continuous as possible in all the levels of a project progression. It is a human psychology that people need to hear an idea many more times that they would start believing in it.

It is essential for a project manager to be transparent to his or her team instead of using information to control a project progress (Sedelmaier and Landes 2017). It is essential to propagate communication in a clear and concise way and eliminating any kind of confusion between the stakeholders of the project. The project manager should effectively assess the possible risks in a project progression and discuss it clearly with the people involved in the project. It should be effectively discussed with the people at team meetings. A project manager should never ignore any update by the team members and should escalate any discontinuity found with the project schedule and strategies (Lloyd-Walker, French and Crawford 2017). Assessing risks in a project before it creates a ruckus in a project is of utmost necessity. Moreover, a project manager needs to be open to criticism and be aware of his or her own self. He or she should be productive keeping in track the timeline of the project, time management being the most important issue in a project.

Despite all of these attempts in trying to become the ideal project manager, it is to be kept in mind that there are situations where clients can be difficult and their behaviour can be a challenge. It is a responsibility of a project manager to handle these clients with a clear and upfront attitude to manage the timeline of a project.

Behavioral Competencies of a Project Manager

According to the assessment of the job and responsibilities of a project manager, it has been found that there are some key learning points that should be implemented while a project manager is performing his or her day-to-day activities (Jiang 2014). These actions taken by a project manager is described as follows:

Effective Communication: Communicating effectively is a critical point in any kind of project management and a successful project manager has to initiate this in the project about to be mastered (DuBois et al. 2015). However, communication is just not limited only to talking or presenting. As far as the studies suggest, communication means the ways of transferring knowledge, solving problems, sharing ideas and even providing information to others. A project manager has to generate communication between all of the stakeholders of a project, with either written form of communication or digital form. Perfect documentation plans, communicating effectively through well-informed emails, updating of every point in a project, client requirement checking, plans, reports, specifications, agendas should be updated well (Ja?ocha et al. 2014). If a project team do not abide by the ideas of a project manager, the project is as good as declared unsuccessful. It is arguably the most important skill that a project manager needs to have.

Juggling and organising: The most important thing for a project manager is to keep track of multiple tasks all at once in a meticulous and organized way and keep juggling through all of these tasks (Hodgson and Paton 2016). The flow of information needs to be kept in order and the tasks need to be juggled every now or then else, a project manager would be nothing but overwhelmed with the flow of information.

Problem Solving and Decision-making capability: An ideal project manager keeps in mind the bigger picture of a project execution. Project managers need to rely on the information coming from different sources and then go on with the plans in mind accordingly (Heagney 2016). It makes a project manager always aware of the risks or problems that arise and making decisions according to the solved problems.

Building a good team: A project manager needs to decide right at the inception of a project on which people the project team should include. This defines the success rate of a project as the appropriate people would only benefit to the project. Choosing the team members according to the technical and psychological needs of the project is of utmost importance (Fleming and Koppelman 2016). marketing, it is also required that the project team should be well aware of their roles and should not be demotivated any time during the project. This is also the responsibility of an ideal project manager.

While preparing the reflective paper about the job role of a project manager, I have come across many aspects of an ideal project manager that have been unknown to me so far. The reflective assessment experience has been a revelation as now it is a clear picture on how to be the ideal and successful project manager. The ideal project manager is nothing of the sort of a dictator who commands to get his or her orders fulfilled but a leader who explains his vision to his teammates and considers their opinions as well while executing a task. A healthy, informative, seamless and assertive communication is the primary responsibility of an ideal project manager and so is the ability to keep all of the information about the project and utilize it keeping the bond between the team members intact during the project timeline. The reflective assessment suggests that a project manager should be productive and at the same time should keep the production cost as minimum as possible abiding by all the project requirements. This reflective assessment thus provides all the information that is needed to become a well-informed, compassionate leader who is coined as a project manager for his ability to deliver a certain project in a required time.

Conclusion

In the end, it can be concluded from the above reflective assessment that for being an ideal project manager it is required that he or she should have proper hard technical skills as well as soft skills. The hard skills make a project manager be technically sound about the project requirements and the soft skills provide the ability to the project manager in handling his or her team. The project manager needs to first, take up a project and check the technical requirements of the task and it is his or her responsibility to be aware of the system and technical requirements of the project according to the client’s needs. The ideal project manager would enhance his or her knowledge of the technology required for the project by constant practise and make it perfect for the project progression. During the reflective assessment, we come across a student’s point of view about the job role of a project manager depending upon his or her previous experience of handling a project. Next, the assessment focuses on the concepts and the principles of a project manager’s task, which includes the understanding of a project manager’s work role according to the module concepts and the ideas and insights linking the theories of these concepts, which enables a project manager to work more effectively. It is necessary that a project manager should keep updating the skills and technologies while going on with their day-to-day works. Primarily, a project manager is supposed to acquire skill sets of a collaborative approach, improving productivity and managing the budget and time span of the project. The next part of the reflective assessment focuses on the key learning points and actions to be taken by a project manager to identify the potential routes for implementing the ideas to progress effectively and productively with any task. Here, according to the assessment of the job and responsibilities of a project manager, it has been found that there are some key learning points that should be implemented while a project manager is performing his or her day-to-day activities. These include effective communication, proper judgement and organization, problem solving and decision-making capabilities and the ability to implement a proper and just team for a project. In the end, the reflective assessment focuses on the process of preparing the reflective essay and the experience that has been obtained while the process. This would enable any student to implement the ideas into becoming a much more attentive and ideal project manager relevant to his or her job role. In future, the student may hold the ability to ability to implement these ideas into their own job responsibilities as a project manager and emerge out successfully through the learning outcomes of this reflective assessment.

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