GOAL: Discovering Your Inner Manager

As a career manager, Im often asked what skills are needed for successful project management. My answer? Your confidence in pulling off successful projectsevery time. Thats how you build a solid reputation, too.

Being a successful manager is not in the genes. Rather, its most encouraging to know that anyone can learn and master the basic concepts of planning, executing and completing a project on time and within budget.

Its no mystery too, that everyone is faced with having to manage life projects on a daily basis. Say youre growing an indoor potted herb garden.

Youre involved in project planning how to steps when you:

1. Think through how to get started with the necessary equipmentwhat kinds of herbs to grow, getting the seeds, new pots and/or pretty recycled containers, and where to place them in your home or office windowsill.
2. Implement your plan by potting the seeds, watering them and rotating them around to catch either sunlight or artificial light.
3. Harvest the results to savor fresh basil in your salad and soup with gusto.

As you can see, project planning and management have been going on for as long as human beings have had to chow down elephant-sized plans into bite-sized morsels to get the job done.

In other words, deftly chewing through an assignment from beginning to end with productive results is project management in a nutshell.

Three Skill Secrets
Three skills are essential for productive project planning:

* Focus
* Planning
* Patience

When youre focused on writing that research paper well, you give it your allwith due diligence, thereby inspiring excellence.

Youll also plan your research strategy with online and offline academic, trade and/or professional sources for the most reliable and respected sources.

Patience with self and others is crucialto avoid jobs done hurriedly with little traction for results.

Tell us what your tips for successful project management are.