How Organization Plays a Crucial Role in Any Project Manager’s Job
Of all the skills needed for project management, organizational skills may be the most important. Because if you are not organized, little else matters. Keep reading to find out why it’s crucial for any project manager.
1. You need to have a process
You need to have a process for your project, a scheme or method that will give you direction and tell you how to proceed. Your efforts will be haphazard without it, and you will make little progress toward your ultimate goal.
Having this strategy or framework will help keep everyone on track and help with decision-making when the unexpected happens.
There are several different kinds of frameworks that are generally used in project management:
Agile
This is a method for managing projects that work by breaking the project into phases. There must be continual collaboration among everyone involved for this strategy to work. Teams go through successive cycles of planning, executing, and evaluating.
Scrum
In this approach, the team is led by the Scrum master. Their primary responsibility is to eliminate the obstacles that block the team from doing its work. The team does its work in short cycles that are called sprints. Team members meet every day to talk about their tasks and problems.
Kanban
This approach is a visual one, where team members make tangible representations of the tasks they need to do. These are often sticky notes attached to whiteboards. There are also apps that can be used. The tasks – represented by the notes – are moved through stages set up in advance to track progress and discover obstacles.
2. Set priorities
This is another aspect of organizing and is crucial to the progress of any project. Without setting priorities – and shifting them depending on circumstances – you will end up just spinning your wheels. The project will never be completed on time, if at all.
Prioritizing is one of the most important skills. Project managers need to help team members identify the essential daily and weekly tasks and need to be tackled first.
One of the most common ways of prioritizing is using what is known as the RICE method. With this approach, each task or project gets a score based on four criteria, and the task with the highest score gets first priority.
The criteria fall under the following labels: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort
Reach
This criterion is the number of people who will be affected by the particular task or work that has to be done.
Impact
This criterion is used to gauge how much of a difference a particular task or project will make.
Confidence
This criterion is used to evaluate how confident you are in your estimates.
Effort
This criterion is used to assess how difficult it will be to complete the task or project.
To determine the RICE score, you multiply reach by impact and by confidence and divide the resulting figure by effort.
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