Running head: SOFT SKILLS OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT 1

Soft Skills of Project Management

Team B:

VAMSHI BELDE

RAJASHEKAR GANGUNAMMA

SAINISHANTH BHOLE

HARI RAJESH THOTAKURI

ANUPAM KUMAR AAKULA

BALA VINAY KUMAR MALLAVARAPU

Campbellsville University

Author Note

Soft Skills of Project Management Draft

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CONTENT

1. INTRODUCTION

2. LEADERSHIP AND MOTIVATION

3. TRUST BUILDING

4. TEAM BUILDING

5. DECISION MAKING

6. COMMUNICATION SKILLS

7. TEAM COACHING SKILLS

REFERENCES
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1. INTRODUCTION

As the field of research encompassing project management is developing, it is winding up more

obvious that accomplishment on the part of undertaking leadership position can't be achieved with

a specialized ability set. Excellent correspondence, or soft skills, are vital imperatives for progress.

Moreover, point by point examine is uncovering that driving is desirable over dealing with a task

group and that the initiative style of the undertaking supervisor specifically impacts the result of

the venture. Task supervisors, including those in charge of data innovation (IT) anticipates, are in

charge of numerous concentrated exercises, for example, arranging, basic leadership, and planning,

critical thinking.

IT organization frequently use diverse sorts of information on undertakings, for

example, approach, procedural, methodological, area, stage, planning. While the association and

expert gatherings can be useful at capturing, pressing and scattering information identified with

specialized abilities required by an IT administrator, reusing learning related to soft skills is

overlooked by numerous associations. However specialized information and learning of soft skills

are accepted to be essential for an IT anticipate chiefs to be effective.

Accordingly, our exploration objective is to look at the most fundamental components of

Soft skills that contribute to making a task administrator effective. We will utilize distinctive

components and subjects with a specific end goal to clarify the significance of soft abilities in

project management.

Soft skills are an art of managing and working with people to retain the customers by

guaranteeing satisfaction. This process facilitates a favorable atmosphere to the team members so

that high quality products can be delivered on time within the budget. Soft skills also help
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consequently exceeding the expectations of stakeholders. Soft skills are usually acquired with

experience (Belzer, 2004).

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2. LEADERSHIP AND MOTIVATION

This article surveys the present writing and hypothetical parts of inspiration and gives an

investigation of the information. An overview was led by requesting venture directors to advise

how they see their capacity to impact inspiration.

Types of Motivation:

Intrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic motivation includes individuals completing a movement since they think that its

fascinating and get unconstrained fulfillment from the action itself.

Extrinsic Motivation

Extrinsic motivation, conversely, requires an instrumentality between the action and some

detachable outcomes, for example, substantial or verbal prizes, so fulfillment comes not from the

action itself but instead from the extraneous results to which the movement leads.

Sources of Motivation:

Optimizing Energy

A manager can encourage the employees to stay in their zone. The managers have to

communicate with the employees and should encourage their work, it can bring a drastic change

in employee’s energy.

Autonomy

Being able to do and permitted to oversee themselves is a standout amongst the most

critical needs and prerequisites of the worker.

Feedback

Giving a positive feedback to the employee is a good type of motivation to achieve a

successful project.
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Rewards & Recognition

The overall concept of rewards and recognition is a kind of motivating the employees to

stand in their way. To present a successful project in any company the managers have to encourage

and recognize the employees work repeatedly.

Factors That Most Commonly Impact Team Motivation

 Lack of support from higher authority,

 personal issues between team members, and

 increase in the scope of the project.

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3. Trust Building

A research done by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) in 1994.

Trust was the common factor in all the findings of this research. The areas that could be impacted

include accelerated time to market, client relationships, reduced risk in contracting, all these will

lower the project cost by a significant amount.

Trustworthiness

Credibility, transferability and credibility are some of the important aspects linked to

trustworthiness. (Guba, 1981). Griffin reviewed various aspects of trust in 1967, he considered

various aspects to conclude that “a Listener’s trust in a speaker”. This means that if the person who

is communicating is trustworthy and is delivering an opinionated message, it is tended to be

accepted well by everyone when compared to a non-opinionated message. Finally, the results show

that a person who is supposed to be trustworthy as well as an expert on the subject results in

bringing a maximum change in opinions.

Conflict Management

There is no general definition of a conflict in any of the literature that has been reviewed.

In general conflicts management approach is focused on factors associated with competitive

intentions like interference with other’s goals(Kenneth, 1992).

Usually the conflicts that arise in IT projects are due to quality “allocation of resources,

quality of work and disagreements on priorities” or other reasons(Schmidt & Kochan, 1972). It is

always not bad to have conflicts because conflicts give a chance to effectively rectify them. The

skill of conflict resolution is very important to limit the behavior of team members from deviating.

Gray Larson suggested that the below strategies should be implemented in order to perform

effective conflict management (Gray & Larson, 2000).

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 Arbitration of Conflict

 Control of Conflict

 Elimination of Conflict

 Mediation of Conflict

 Arbitration of Conflict
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4. TEAM BUILDING

4.1 Team building in ongoing process:

Building the program group is one of the prime obligations of the program supervisor.

Group building includes an entire range of administration aptitudes required to recognize, confer,

and incorporate the different errand bunches from the customary practical association into a

solitary program administration framework. To complete the given task successfully, the

program supervisor or the manager must give an environment that is helpful for collaboration.

The below are the objective that every organization has to follow for maintaining the

team together and in working. There are:

 Selecting the team member which is suitable for the environment.

 Having good interpersonal relations and team spirit.

 Providing good resources to the team and expertise.

 Giving a clear goals and guidelines that can be followed by every individual.

 Good leadership objectives that have to be performed by project manager and Team

leads.

 Open communication among the team members and interactive meeting for supporting

the organization.

 Maintaining a low degree conflicts in between the Head leaders and co-workers.

Conclusion: The above objective mainly covers about three factors: 1) Effective

Communication 2) Sincere interest in professional growth of the organization. 3) Commitment to

the project.

4.2 Effectiveness in a Team:

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An effective team member can enable an association to accomplish amazing outcomes.

The below are characteristics that effective team has:

 The team having a typical concentration, including clear and reasonable objectives,

plans of actions and approaches to gauge achievement.

 Suitable roles and obligations are clearly characterized to each member.

 Every part has unmistakably characterized desires to work with different individuals.

 The group should completely utilize their assets in inside and outside the organization.

 Individuals esteem for each other's disparities in sound and profitable ways.

To gather a successful group, a project leader or the head of the team needs to set up a

hierarchical situation in which single member can think about and break down divide the task

with other colleagues. A Leader ought to support the determination of any contentions through

communication, proficient encounter, and readily and straightforwardly arrange important

changes. To put it plainly, successful leader are supporters of the group; they energize and

bolster individuals who are conferred and effectively included with their groups and draw in

those individuals who aren't taking an interest.

4.3 Ineffectiveness in a Team:

The problems within the team can eventually translate into problems for the company,

impacting either on the bottom line or in its business relationships, For Example :

 Customer complaints could increase

 Revenue losses because of business going to another firm

 No success in any of the new business pitches made by the team

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It is important for companies to act immediately if they see any of these symptoms of

team ineffectiveness and investigate the cause, a few examples of which are below:

 Role clarity

 Lack of clear cut goals

 Poor leadership

 Inadequate training

 Differences in work styles

 Poor planning

So, can you identify the symptoms of team ineffectiveness? You need to, as without this

first fundamental step, you can't go on to investigate different processes and approaches to

build a truly dynamic and effective team for your organization.

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5. DECISION MAKING

Decisions drive projects. There should be a decision to proceed or to start project. The decisions

include many things like requirements, the choice of resources, design approach, and various other

issues. Decision making is a critical success factor.

Basic Decision-Making Approach.

The Basic approach to making decisions in management is a pack of set of steps:

Identify the problem– Follow-up to check there is a problem, define the goals, and gather the

information needed to make a decision.

Generate all possible solutions– brainstorm all solutions, preferably in a group.

Generate objective criteria– generate the measurement criteria to assess the possible solution,

Begin taking into account criteria for measuring the success or failure of the decision.

Select the best option– Among all the possibility solutions, using the filtering criteria, make a

decision on the best possible solution.

Implement the solution– put into place the preferred solution.

Monitor the results– track and monitor the outcome of the implemented solution and the results

to make sure ensure any new problems arises. This may take some time for long-term outcomes

to become apparent.

Simple Mistakes in Decision Making

There are common mistakes that cause us to make a project failure. These are often cited as:
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1.Errors in logic

2.False assumptions

3.Unreliable memories

4.Mistaking the symptom for the problem

5.Biases

6.Non-Monitoring
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6. COMMUNICATION SKILLS

1. Importance of Communication skills in Project Management:

a) What to communicate

b) When to communicate

c) How much to communicate

d) Who to communicate

2. Top 5 Effective Communication Skills for Project Managers:

a) Active Listening

b) Open-Mindedness, Friendliness, Trust and Respect

c) Setting Clear Priorities

d) Feedback and Collaboration

e) Conveying the Organization’s Vision

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7. TEAM COACHING SKILLS

For a successful project outcome, need to be aware of Hard skills and Soft skills. Hard skills such

as technical or domain expertise may be essential in the project, where as soft skilled such as tacit

knowledge of organizational culture and clients are the most important contribution to the

successful project outcome. In any organization soft skills not only improve project's outcome

directly, but are especially helpful when the project has greater coordination complexity or when

there is less familiarity with the task or client.

Soft skills are the personal attributes that allows people to successfully interact with

business/clients and managing among themselves.

The Biggest problem in today's business is unprecedented soft skills. How to overcome this

scenario? Some of the important key components for soft skills are:

Communications

Problem-solving

Team-playing abilities

Creativity and flexibility

Thus, project is driven by the magical triangle between time, budget and quality. While short term

thinking focus on time and budget, it is that has the most important impact on long term customer

satisfaction. Quality is influenced by several factors, such as designing, development process,

requirement management.
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References

Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling,

11th Edition by Harold Kerzner.Belzer, A. (2004). It’s Not Like Normal School: The Role of

Prior Learning Contexts. Adult

Education Quarterly.

Gray, & Larson. (2000). Project Management: The Managerial Process.

Guba, G. (1981). Criteria for Assessing the Trustworthiness of Naturalistics Inquiries. ECT, 7591.

Kenneth, T. (1992). Conflict and Conflict Management: Reflections and. Journal of

Organizational Behavior.

Ambrose, M. L., & Kulik, C. T. (1999). Old friends, new faces: Motivation research in the

1990s. Journal of Management, 25(3), 231–292.

Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments

examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin,

125(6), 627–668.

Huszczo, G. E. (2004). Tools for team leadership: Delivering the X-factor in team

excellence (1st ed.). Palo Alto, CA: Davies-Black Pub. Lewis, J. P. (2003). Project

leadership. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Soft Skills in Project Management: Academic Journal (By: Ravindranath, Sindhu).

Top Five Communication Skills for Project Managers Blog by: Ciara McDonnell.

https://www.brightwork.com/blog/top-5-effective-communication-skills-project-

managers#.WtuA4cgvyUk

Top Five Communication Skills for Project Managers Blog by: Jo Ann Sweeney.

https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/top-five-communication-skills-for-project-managers.php
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Communication methods and its importance in project management, Blog by: whizlabsteam.

https://www.whizlabs.com/blog/project-management-communication/