As my first learning objective is centred on improving my project management skills it is vital that i understand the basics of these, however, project management skills are much more than just one individual skill instead is a mixture.
This mixture according to a blog post by the company LiquidPlanner suggests that is a multitude of six:
The first being communication as you have to be able to convey ideas and thoughts to the various teams that are involved in creating this project. According to this blog, the easiest way to improve your communication skills is to do presentations and work in various group projects, I would argue that I have however been doing this already to some extent by doing presentations within the degree programme and I work in various groups both for university projects and outside of this.
The next is leadership as you are seen as the person who is in charge of the project overall and this means that it is key to be able to delegate things to other people as well as understand what you want to achieve in the project.
The third skill that is needed heavily relates to the previous two is team management as this is needed to ensure that the project is successful as you must make sure that the teams that work for you see through their jobs and help to sort out any issues alongside being able to lead these teams to fulfil them, directly correlating to leadership.
The fourth skill is negotiation as you must be able to settle any disputes that arise when undertaking the project and making sure that all the parties that are involved in the project are happy with the final outcome, this heavily relates to being able to effectively communicate with people so that jobs are done and that you are able to talk to one another.
Organisation is the fifth skill needed to be a good project manager as you must be able to organise yourself to stand a chance at being able to organise anyone else who is working with or for you
Finally, risk management is mentioned as you must be able to foresee any potential problems that may occur when the project is being undertaken and plan to avoid them, so for us this could be the risk of us not having enough contributors due to someone dropping out, or no one wanting to be involved and we would need to resolve this by having people on backup that we could ask.
I would say that i have utilised all of these skills in doing this project as there have been numerous occasions where I have needed all of these skills to complete things to allow the completion of the project as a whole, for example finding contributors used a combination of communication, negotiation and organisation to make sure that a date had been set and that this had been told to the contributors and that they knew about everything they were being asked to do.
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