5 ways to become a better project manager

Whether you are new to the profession or a seasoned professional, there is always room to improve your project management skills. Project management is not like solving a mathematical equation, where eventually there is one solution. Every situation is unique and has several solutions. Your experience helps to deal with ever more complex situations. Below I outline 5 things you can do to get to that next level of maturity.

Despite every situation being unique, as you grow more experienced, you will start to recognise patterns. The more situations you have seen, be it in your own experience or from others’ sharing, the more you will find analogies or regularities that apply to many situations.

Learning comes in two ways: structured and unstructured. Structured learning comes from engaging with codified or explicit knowledge; unstructured learning is harder, it comes from experiencing situations or from interacting with people that have experienced situations. The first two elements below are clearly structured ways of learning, the next two are ways to acquire unstructured learning. The last point transcends the dichotomy.

1. Read

This first method might seem obvious. There is so much information available, in books, in articles and blogs… Reading those resources is a very effective way to increase your knowledge.

If you are new to project management, the available amount of reading material might be overwhelming. A good starting point - however silly it might sound - is the book Project Management for Dummies. It is clearly written and explains the fundamental techniques in just enough detail to make it practical for a beginner.

If you have already some experience, a book about project management might not be the most efficient way to grow, but there are quite a few other resources you could turn to. There are plenty of blogs to follow, e.g. projectmanagement.com from the Project Management Institue. Of course, I would also recommend to follow my blog posts :-)

Finally, your reading list should not be limited to specific project management elements; a project manager does not only need “technical” project management skills, but also leadership and business skills. Two domains I consider key in the leadership domain are negotiation and influencing - a project manager usually leads without formal power, so these skills are indispensable. In the business domain, you can read about finance or strategy, two aspects a project manager should be familiar with, or news about your specific industry.

2. Take a training course

The most evident way to improve your project management skillset is to follow a training or course. This is the most structured type of learning, with explicit knowledge being transferred in a formalised way.

There are plenty of introductory courses or basic project management skills trainings on the market. Another option is to participate in a best practices training, like PRINCE2®. This is not only for beginners, also more experienced project managers might benefit from the structure this method brings to things they have been doing intuitively or based on experience. Once you have been managing projects for a while (3 years to be eligible to take the exam), you could study for the PMP® certification. This provides you with the competencies needed to lead a sizable project.

I consider training courses especially useful for more technical or “hard” project management skills. If you want to learn more about planning, for example, or risk management, then formal training might be a good first step. For leadership or “soft” skills, I don’t think a training course is the best way to learn. But even for the technical skills, I consider it only a beginning. 25 years ago, a book on sales was published, with the title You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar. There are many more things you cannot learn in a workshop, project management is one of those. You can learn some theory and study techniques, but you need to fall off your bike a few times to experience what the theory actually means.

We live in a privileged time, where the types of training courses you can take is almost limitless. There are many training organisations and universities offering project management courses. But on the internet you can find MOOCs, webinars, or Youtube videos that, if not substitute, at least complement the other types of training.

3. Learn from others

Other people are an important source of learning. But people do not always know what they know, so tapping into their knowledge will not be very structured. It is therefore important to build a large network. The more people you know that deal with (even remotely) related work, the more opportunities to learn from their experience.

One way to kickstart your learning from others is to find a mentor: someone who has more experience and can dedicate some time to your growth. Your mentor can serve as a soundboard and advise you on concrete topics. Furthermore, your mentor can keep you accountable for commitments on your personal learning path; it is easier to follow up on a promise when you made it to some else than yourself.

The more people you can observe and discuss topics with, the better. To make that easier, you can join a Community of Practice (CoP): a group of people that deal with similar topics and that interact regularly. Such a CoP helps with sharing of lessons learned and good practices. You might have a CoP in your organisation, or you could find one externally. I was a member of the Hong Kong Chapter of PMI, where very regularly seminars or social events around project management were organised, even through the pandemic. I am also participating in the quarterly PMO User Group that is organised by QRP International. It brings together (mainly Belgian) people working on project management and PMO topics. There are plenty of other CoPs out there, e.g. organised via MeetUp.

4. Learn from your experience

Don’t underestimate what you know yourself. There is a reason organistions rather hire someone with experience than a beginner: it is easier and quicker to repeat something you have done before than to invent response to a new situation. Even unwittingly you accumulate knowledge from actually doing.

If you are serious about improving your skills, you should take a more conscious approach. Start by actively reflecting on situations you have dealt with, how you responded to them and what the results were. Think about what went particularly well, and hence what you should keep doing or try to make standard practice; also consider what did not go well, and why, so you can prevent this in the future or at least do better.

The next step would be to keep notes of your reflections and put time in your agenda to review your notes every so often. On the one hand, you will realise that sometimes you repeat mistakes you have made before. But on the other hand, you train your memory muscle and get better at seeing patterns in the situations you face.

The final step in learning from your own experience is to share your learnings with others. This will force you to carefully think it through. By turning your learnings into a coherent story you really anchor your learnings. And when your audience asks questions, this will even sharpen your understanding. For example, I train people in project management. And although I deliver the same training regularly, I get new insights from almost every session. My story is very well established in the meantime, but my thinking is each time further fine-tuned.

5. Experiment

The final technique to get better is the most advance. You will need to implement at least a few of the previous four in order to get started with this one. It is a natural extension of learning from your experience: here you will start pro-actively looking for learnings by anticipating situations.

The other forms of learning can be combined to form a hypothesis about how to tackle a possible situation. As said earlier, by being exposed to learnings, be it structured or unstructured, you will start to identify patterns. This pattern should be considered a hypothesis about how a certain solution applies to a particular situation.

When you have formulated your hypothesis, you will need to consider how you could validate or falsify it. Basically, you will create an experiment to test your hypothesis. Ideally, you find a harmless situation where making a mistake is not too much of a problem. Before you address the situation, you consider the effect you expect your action will have. Then you compare the actual result with your expected outcome. If your lucky, you confirm your hypothesis, but that will rarely be the case. But if the result is different than expected, that is maybe even better news. Either you learned that something does not work, or you have new information to sharpen your hypothesis.

This method I just described is basically the implementation in your personal learning of the continual improvement cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Act. This method was made popular by W. Edwards Deming, and forms the basis of most best practice procedures, in project management as well as in many other areas of business.

The role of the PMO

When project managers improve their skillset, the organistions where they work also benefit. It is in an organisation’s best interest to help and facilitate this learning of their project managers. The success rate of projects will be improved, problems will be tackled more efficiently or even prevented, and the people working on projects will be more engaged.

Therefore the PMO has an important role to play in knowledge management: both curating the lessons learned and disseminating them back to the project managers.

• Reading material: the PMO can provide reading material, in the form of articles stored on a shared drive or books in a library. Even better would be to provide summaries of that material.

• Training: the PMO should take the lead in collaborating with the HR or Learning & Development department to define a curriculum of trainings. It should create a list of necessary skills, and advise people on how to build those skills with courses in the curriculum. If organisation-specific trainings are missing, it can create those, with the learnings from actual projects.

• Learn from others: the PMO should build the CoP internally. It can create networking events in the community to help both formal and informal exchange of experiences.

• Learn from experience: the PMO can stimulate personal reflection and resulting note-taking, by requesting a summary of lessons learned at certain points in a project. This should not just happen at the end of a project, as an administrative hurdle to get the project formally closed: that only forces the project manager to think for a few minutes about lessons from the last few weeks, it does not make it a habit. Asking a summary of learnings at every milestone event is a better pace. The PMO should always be careful not to turn this into bureaucracy: don’t ask for reporting for the sake of having reports. These are ideal moments to also give back: provide learnings from other projects that could help the project manager in their project. This demonstrates the usefulness, hence motivating the project manager to make it a habit.