Soft skills continue to be a key asset for project management teams. Developing realistic budgets and workable activity schedules relies heavily on the ability to communicate effectively with stakeholders, negotiate with and gain consensus among project sponsors, and demonstrate a willingness to explore innovative or unconventional solutions to difficult challenges. But as the business world moves deeper into initiatives such as remote work and artificial intelligence, project professionals can benefit from building a few new soft skills.
Flexibility to accommodate multiple work arrangements.
With the rise of hybrid work environments, project team members must adapt their strategies to ensure accountability and maintain cohesion across distributed teams. That begins with developing the muscles to drive productivity whether you and your colleagues are at home, in the office, or somewhere else. It also means gaining proficiency across a range of virtual collaboration tools with different feature sets and different use cases. You’ll also need the skills to deliver messages effectively no matter when or where your colleagues prefer to share information. Clarity and conciseness remain primary pillars of effective communication, but implementing those elements across email, video calls, instant messages, group chats, and other platforms requires extra finesse.
In addition, addressing remote work challenges requires a fundamental understanding that some project participants may not share your time zone, your work schedule, or even your language. Effective communications across many layers of diversity may require becoming comfortable asking (and answering) more questions rather than making assumptions. It’s also important to be empathetic to the challenges of other stakeholders, as they may be adjusting to different arrangements and organizational structures in their own work environments or learning new systems themselves.
Willingness to lean into data analytics for enhanced decision making.
Many project teams already leverage some type of data analytics, but forward-looking professionals should also embrace opportunities to incorporate new tools and techniques to understand what’s possible, to gauge what doesn’t work (and why), and to be candid in assessing where additional insights are or are not as usefulas hoped. A large portion of these tools are still evolving and expanding, so a willingness to trial analytics software with an understanding that the feature set may not be what you need will be very useful in the long run. Recognize that you won’t move forward after every pilot, but don’t let that stop you from experimenting with what’s out there.
By understanding the real-world resources you have available to help you analyze information, interpret predictions, and spot trends, you can more effectively find those solutions that fill the gaps in your current technology stack. Building familiarity with the marketplace will also enable you to spot new platforms that suit your unique needs and to make use of the specific functionality that’s most relevant to your organization.
Emotional intelligence to collaborate across a dynamic range of personality types.
People are increasingly moving away from traditional, linear career paths and are instead embracing job transitions that expose them to entirely new disciplines, expanded roles, unfamiliar corporate hierarchies, emerging verticals, fresh customer bases, and a wider variety of stakeholder groups. One byproduct of so much change is that project teams are now likely to encounter many more personality types as part of the day-to-day work. Project team members who can recognize and manage their own motivators, as well as those of others, are better equipped to navigate challenging situations and build strong, productive relationships. The ability to understand the communication styles of different personalities and to collaborate in a positive way with a variety of individuals will be key to project success long into the future.
PMAlliance, Inc uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management.