the core skill sets

Interpersonal skills: Enabling decision making: The ability to enable decision making on the team, or gather decisions from the appropriate leader is crucial to keep projects on task and achieve their goals. As a project manager, you will need to enable decisions frequently. Communicating and escalating: As a project manager, you’ll use your communication skills in just about everything you do. And you need to know when it is appropriate to escalate, so that critical issues are raised and addressed as soon as possible to reduce negative impact on a project. Remaining flexible: As a project manager, knowing how to be flexible when changes are needed is key. Plans will change — even with careful, upfront planning. As a project manager being flexible is critical to be able to course correct and adapt when the unexpected happens. Organizational Skills: Having strong organizational skills means having the ability to organize the core elements of a project and ensure nothing gets lost or overlooked. A project manager needs to be organized so that they can manage a project and all of its moving parts. Negotiation: As a project manager, you’ll have to know how to balance the needs of your teammates with the needs of the project. For example, if a teammate says they can’t complete their work on time, you may need to compromise on a deadline. Conflict mediation: Resolving tension and conflict within a team is an important skill. This may involve setting up a meeting with two teammates that are struggling to agree upon the best way to handle a shared task. Understanding motivations: Getting to know your teammates and figuring out what pushes them to their best work is an effective skill to have. Understanding motivations also involves understanding how your teammates prefer to receive feedback.

let's discuss the core skill sets that a project manager should bring to the role.

While there are lots of different skills a project manager can bring to their role,

there are four specific skill sets that we think can help a project manager be successful.

Those are enabling decision-making, communicating and escalating, flexibility,

and strong organizational skills.

First, let's talk about enabling decision-making.

The ability to enable decision-making on the team, or gathering decisions from the appropriate leader, is crucial to keep projects on task and achieve their goals.

Lots of the day-to-day decisions within a project will likely fall to you and

your teammates to discuss and agree on.

You'll ensure that projects stay on schedule by gathering information from

teammates and using those insights to help the team make informed decisions.

You'll also make sure that those decisions are communicated to the necessary coworkers, whether that's the immediate team or company leaders.

For example, you might provide relevant data or feedback to help your teammates make

an informed decision between choice A and choice B.

The second skill is communicating and escalating.

As a project manager, you'll use your communication skills in just about

everything you do.

This might look like documenting plans, sending emails about the status of the project,

or holding a meeting to escalate risks or issues to stakeholders.

The third skill is flexibility.

As a project manager, knowing how to be flexible when changes are needed is key.

Plans definitively will change, even with careful upfront planning.

For example, maybe the goals of your company change,

or maybe a member of your team unexpectedly takes a new position at another company.

A good project manager knows that unpredictable moments like these are almost

always guaranteed.

A quote we love here at Google is, "The only constant is change," and that's true.

By staying cool under pressure, you'll be able to adjust while

helping your team stay calm, too.

Finally, a successful project manager needs strong organizational skills.

As you learned earlier, the role of a project manager requires using a lot

of different processes to keep the project on track.

Having strong organizational skills means having the ability to organize

these processes and the core elements of a project to ensure nothing gets lost

or overlooked, which trust me, can and does happen.

To prevent this, you might decide to track daily tasks in a spreadsheet or send

frequent status updates or reminders.

There are many ways to stay organized and hone your organizational skills,

and we'll talk more about them throughout the program.

To recap, decision-making, communicating and escalating, flexibility,

and strong organizational skills are four core skill sets that are

essential to successful project management.

You can continue to build on these skills by becoming familiar with

industry knowledge that applies to most project management roles.

Knowledge of helpful tools and templates and familiarity with popular project management styles like Waterfall and Agile, can help you organize and document

the project throughout its lifecycle.

We'll learn about these throughout this program.

Hopefully, you feel better equipped to explain the core skills a project manager

should bring to the role.

These skills really help enforce team morale and accountability for the tasks of a project.

We'll discuss this coming up. See you soon.

In this exercise, you will read a scenario and comment about how you would react to the situation. Then, you will list and describe skills that make a project manager successful. Start by considering the following scenario: A co-worker is responsible for researching and providing you with a list of potential venues for a retirement party. For the last three weeks, they have been telling you they will complete the list by “the end of the week (EOW).” When you check in with them at the beginning of each of the weeks, they tell you they didn’t get around to completing it but that it will be done by the current week. How might you influence this situation without authority? Write 2-3 sentences. 1 / 1 point I will talk to co-worker first and negotiate why is it not happening on time, will find the solution how to remove that problem, then will create a new plan with the end date of submission of the fixed venue. And will provide every support that they need. Then will keep short meeting morning and afternoon to be sure that they are able to stick to the new decision , Correct How did you do? Here are a few approaches we recommend: Talk to your co-worker about the overall schedule for the retirement party, and explain to them how selecting a venue as soon as possible is critical to the success of the overall event and will determine what the date of the party will be. Ask your co-worker about their current workload and see if there is anything you can do to free up their schedule. You can also offer to get someone else to help them, if needed. Midweek, consider sending your co-worker a gentle reminder about their end of week commitment and ask how it's coming along.

2. Question 2 Write a list of the most valuable interpersonal skills required to be a successful project manager and describe how each skill contributes to a project manager’s success. Write and describe at least four skills. 1 / 1 point 1.enabling decision-making-when the situation is requires a fast change, that depend of the all project success to keep projects on task and achieve the goals.provide relevant data or feedback to help teammates make an informed decision between choice A and choice B. 2communicating and escalating. communicated to the necessary coworkers, whether that's the immediate team or company leaders, like documenting plans, sending emails about the status of the project, or holding a meeting to escalate risks or issues to stakeholders. 3 flexibility-to be flexible when changes are needed .Plans definitively will change, even with careful upfront planning. For example, maybe the goals of company change, 4 strong organizational skills.- Need a lot of different processes to keep the project on track, to ensure nothing gets lost or overlooked Correct Here’s a recap of the most valuable interpersonal skills we’ve discussed so far in the course.