Being a successful project manager is not an easy task. You might think that assuming the simple responsibilities of the project manager will result in successful project management, but the problem lies exactly in these seemingly simple tasks which include but are by no means limited to planning, organising and controlling the project.

A successful project manager must be capable of defining the project objectives and create a plan for reaching the objectives. Being a good project manager in this phase could be compared to being a good writer. A writer can use hundreds of different ways to write a book. But a good book needs to be easily read and easily understood. If it’s too complicated or hard to follow, it can’t become a best-seller. The same applies to successfully defining the project objectives and creating the plan to reach them.

And in order to do that – your first goal must always be understanding the project goals yourself. Often university professors and supposedly smart academics speak or write as if they were from another planet. They are unable (or unwilling) to speak about a subject with simple words. They like to use words people don’t use often or don’t even know, they like to use the sentence structures you need to read over and over and over again to understand the point they are trying to make. Of course, not everyone does it – the people who actually know what they are talking about, manage to make even the most complicated topics as easily understood as possible.

That’s exactly what you need to do as a project manager. You need to keep things as simple as possible.

Whenever you work with something that requires multiple steps to be taken in order to reach the end – each next step depends on the success of the previous step. And if the previous step wasn’t completed well enough, everything that is yet to come will have problems.

If possible, include the project members (your team) already in the project planning process. Because in this phase each team member could already give some great input and help the plan become a better one than you could have created alone. And – including your team members in the process gives them the feeling of being an important member of the team.

Organising the project includes assigning tasks to specific people, identifying, finding and dividing the necessary resources. Both financial and human resources.

The role of the project manager also includes being the kindergarten teacher. You must make sure the kids are playing not fighting with each other. And if someone doesn’t want to help the other kid even though he’s supposed to, you need to deal with it. You’re a problem solver, you must be the project Nostradamus as far as foreseeing potential conflicts goes. And you’re the King who must solve the conflicts that have arisen. Yet, you must be an equal friend of your „servants“ at the same time. Easier said than done, isn’t it?

I remember back in high school, one of my teacher always liked to say – trust, but verify. The same words combined also the signature phrase of Ronald Reagan.

So the next phase in project management is controlling and verifying. The function of controlling means tracking the project, verifying everything is as it’s supposed to be and dealing with any kind of disparencies between the plan and the reality.

You must remember that while the plan you created must be followed, your plan must always be flexible enough – should you see a way to improve the plan in order to improve the performance of your team.  And of course, in order to see the areas in which you could do better, you should use progress reports as a way to measure performance.

Being a successful project manager isn’t easy – it takes a lot of effort, experience and skills. But as with everything – if you can put your mind to it, you can do it.