Skills Required for Effective Project Management
By Colleen Garton and Erika McCulloch
Editor's Note: This article is excerpted from Chapter 1 of Fundamentals of Technology Project Management
To be an effective project manager you need a fairly diverse set of skills. To develop these skills, you need a certain level of talent in quite a few areas. For instance, you need to be organized. If you live your life in a totally chaotic way, never remember to pay bills on time, turn up late for everything, and hate having to live by a schedule, this is probably not a good career choice for you! An important note is that being a great engineer or an accomplished technical lead does not necessarily mean that you will make an effective project manager or that you will enjoy being a project manager. Project management should not be seen as the obvious next step on the career path of an engineer who is looking for what he or she should be doing next. Project management is a career in itself, and though it requires some level of technical acumen, it is not going to be a good career choice for everyone who possesses some technical knowledge.