Hey, and welcome back. Now that you've learned
about the roles and responsibilities of
a project manager, 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.