- Checking in with team members
- Collating regular feedback from the team members
- Helping team members escalate issues to the right people to resolve them
- Coordinating meetings with non-project team members
- Providing positive feedback to help drive the project forward
- Serving as a liaison between IT and the business side
- Working with the project team on release night to see the project through to completion
Project Management as a Critical Skillset
March 1, 2021 |
Networks
Public sector IT departments have undergone sweeping modernization efforts, from virtualization and mobility to cloud computing and digital transformation. At the same time, this challenging period of remote work increases the burden on federal IT teams to ensure staffers can continue working without technical glitches and keep projects on track.
The project manager (PM) is an increasingly critical role. The most successful project managers have IT skills, as well as communication, collaboration, and other “people skills” to truly help with digital transformation and other agency initiatives.
The 2020 SolarWinds IT Trends Report echoed this. According to the report, 69% of respondents chose project management as the most critical non-technical skill necessary in successfully managing today’s modern IT environments. Additional skills like interpersonal communication (57%) and people management (53%) were ranked as almost equally important.
CIO Magazine’s annual State of the CIO Survey confirmed similar results, finding that the top skills needed for digital transformation were strategy building (40%), project management (32%), and business relationship management (25%).
A successful project manager will perform non-technical tasks to help keep the project on schedule, including: