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The Five Essential Characteristics of Project Managers

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The Five Essential Characteristics of Project Managers
Week 7– Case Study

Tiantian Shi

Keiser University

Dr. Salas-Amaro

Project Management

February 23, 2013

Introduction

In the case 4-1, Pureswing Golf prefers to promote voluntary and promising engineers to project managers because they are familiar with the company’s philosophy of competitive success and they can run new product projects well. However, because project managers are volunteers, the failure rate of projects is high to 40%. Pureswing Golf has realized this issue and wants to search high-performance managers in more scientific way. This paper focus on the positive personality traits of project managers which can contribute to project success and negative personality traits of project managers which would hamper the effective management of projects.

The Five Essential Characteristics of Project Managers

1, Good interpersonal and communication skills

The ability of communication is always one of the most important skill for effective management. Project managers need to know how to clearly and accurately present the right information to the right people in the appropriate manner (Rosenhead, 2012). For the external environment, project managers need to be able to explain the needs and decisions to a wide variety of stakeholders (Pinto, 2010). It is also necessary to convince stakeholders to keep focus on project benefits to get more supports. For the internal environment, project managers need to have a good interaction with team members throughout the project implementation process which include talking and listening concerns and potential problems of the project, giving the feedback and coach to team members, motiving team members keeping high-performances (Pinto, 2010). It is good to create an openness and directness communication environment for the project team. Obviously, a bad communicator cannot be a project manager.

2, Team-Building skills



References: Pinto, K. J. (2010). Project management: Achieving competitive advantage, 2nd ed. Pearson Education Rosenhead, R. (2012). Can the personality traits of a project manager contribute to project success? Retrieved from http://www.ronrosenhead.co.uk/4630/can-the-personality-traits-of-a-project-manager-contribute-to-project-success/ Brown, S. (2012). Factors most critical to the success of a project manage. Retrieved from http://www.brighthubpm.com/resource-management/63002-factors-most-critical-to-the-success-of-a-project-manager/ Barry, R.T. (2013). Top 10 qualities of a project manager. Retrieved from http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/top-10-qualities-project-manager.html

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