Afterword Ten Top Tips for Managing Projects

These are our top ten tips for being a successful project manager. They assume you actually have the skills necessary for project management. In other words, these tips are not a substitute for reading and understanding this book and making the effort to apply its lessons in real life. They are tips to help you apply them in real life. We don't claim them to be unique to us or that they would be everyone's choices. They're just things we've picked up, borrowed from others, and sometimes learned the hard way over a combined 50 years of managing projects. If you already do these things, great.

1 Know your people

Projects are done by teams. Even the simplest of individual projects will require assistance from someone else. The project manager has to lead his team, and to do this well he must know them. Leadership is much more than following the latest fad. You have to know your team and make the effort to continue to do so. How often have we all felt better about ourselves when our boss commented on our non-work activities or asked after our families and actually knew something about them?

Team-building activities are always worthwhile, provided they are well organized. You don't personally have to organize a survival week in the Amazonian jungle. Professionally run centres know how to generate camaraderie in teams and can put together activities appropriate to your team and needs. You can learn a great deal about your team from such events, but just taking your team for a coffee or to the pub can be of enormous benefit, as will actually taking the time to talk to them and remembering some of what they say. If you're managing a project so big that knowing everyone is impractical, ensure they all know you and that your junior managers do know their people.

Tip

Get to know your team. Time and money spent developing your relationship with each of them will pay dividends in the long run.

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