Thrive as a Project Manager with Right Skillset

Back in May, our IT career guru, Susan Hall, wrote a post about the growing demand for project managers, with project management skills listed in over 235,000 online job listings for May alone.

In a separate post, Hall explored what it takes to be a good project manager, and included a quote from Frank Ryle, a project management veteran who wrote a book on it. Among other qualities, a good project manager should be willing to “reshape the rule, the process, whenever things change.”

If you’re looking to make a career change into project management, Ryle recommends coming up with projects of your own to demonstrate that you’re up to the task. After all, it’s important that you have the right skillset to see projects through, from start to finish, as well as on time and on budget.

Below are just a few of the many tools available in our IT Downloads library that deal with project management, and will help propel you in the field.

Eleven Reasons IT Projects Fail: Project failure has an enormous impact on government and private sector business alike, costing billions of dollars every year. Identify and remedy the warning signs before failure occurs using this checklist, compiled by the editors of IT Business Edge. Feel free to share this PDF with your coworkers or employees.

Project Concept Form: Laying out the needs and benefits behind an initiative is the first — and often most overlooked — step in project management. This sample project concept form can be used as a template for any project your organization is considering.

Project Team Meeting Agenda Template: Nobody likes meetings, but without them your project will derail quickly. Use this agenda template to make sure you and your team are prepared to have a productive — and hopefully short — project meeting.