Project Management Tutorial Part 4: Basic Management Skills & Quality Tools

In this post, we continue our Project Management process tutorial with information about Basic Management Skills and Basic Quality Tools. Catch up on parts 1-3 here. 

Managers are entrusted with the responsibilities for successfully completing set of business activities leading to the achievement of various business goals and objectives. Manager’s prime responsibility hence includes “getting things done in the right way and meet the objectives”. While the real work and activities will be always done by a team of workers/experts depending upon type of work. Hence every manager or executive with above responsibilities will need   to use basic management skills for achieving the stated objectives.

At a higher level, every manager will need to

1. Plan the work
2. Organize the team
3. Direct the team for doing the work, and
4. Control the progress for effective completion of the work.

Broadly the skill sets required of a manager can be classified as Hard Skills and Soft Skills and can be learned while taking a PMP certification course. Hard Skills may include skills such as planning, controlling, technical and business skills; while the soft skills will include mostly interpersonal skills and working with human resources

Following are some of the basic management skills every manager will need to possess.

1. Planning and Organizing 

Planning all facets of the work to be done, including the content of the work, time duration of the work, resource requirements of the work is very important. Planning also will include planning for the quality of the deliverables, skills sets of team members, other physical resource planning, risk planning, stakeholder management planning and vendor management planning.

Planning also will include planning for how to monitor and control the progress; various controlling tools etc. to be deployed.

It is also important to identify and organize the resources for successful execution of the plan.

2. Team Building & Team Management

Team management and team building is central to successful management. Ensuring each team member’s performance is to the best potential and also ensuring that the team is really functioning as a cohesive unit with immense respect and trust is critical for success.

 3. Leadership

This includes managing one’s own self as well as leading others clearly. This will include influencing,

motivating, conflict management, decision making and effective delegating abilities.

4. Communication

Communicating effectively with all stakeholders ensuring that the right information reaches the right stakeholder at the right time using written, verbal and non-verbal communication skills is of paramount importance. Communication manages smooth collaboration between members. Communication also includes listening and questioning.

5. Problem Solving & Critical Thinking 

It is important to have the abilities to critically think through the problems and find out solutions to problems at hand. The manager needs to have the ability for conceptual and abstract thinking.

Basic Management Skills Conclusion 

Managing people and processes is both an art and science that requires technical and experience-blended practice. The above article is a very introductory insight into the management skills needed and importance of the same. But as the old adage goes” you become better only with regular practice”, same is true for these set of management skills. One becomes adept at them only with time and experience and using them for years with dedication and sincerity.

Basic Quality Tools

Quality Management has become a full-fledged science today. It has emerged from being subjective and more perception based to more objective and measurable. Processes and standards are the backbone of modern quality management. Quality Management today uses various data driven statistical tools for meaningful assurance and control of quality. Sessions on statistical tools and other quality tools are an essential part of a Professional Project Management course.

Focus is on Process Compliance and Continuous Process Improvement for quality management. This is where there a generic set of basic quality management tools are used. Below is a list of some of the basic quality management tools. As per CQE (Certified Quality Engineer) Handbook 95% of quality related problems can be solved with these tools.

• Cause and effect diagram
• Control Charts
• Flowcharting
• Histogram
• Pareto Chart
• Run Chart
• Scatter diagram

1. Cause and Effect Diagram 

Root cause Analysis (RCA) is an integral part of Quality Management. This is done to prevent similar defects from happening in future. Cause and Effect diagram is used to do root cause analysis. This is also known as Fish-bone Diagram and Ishikawa Diagram. This tool helps stimulate good brainstorming within the team doing root cause analysis and helps organize their thoughts. The team asks “why” multiple times for a given problem and tries to find the root causes. Below is a sample fishbone diagram.

2. Flowcharting 

Flowchart is an integral part of quality management tools.  Flowchart in the context of seven basic quality tools is defined as to describe the graphical presentation of a process. 

A process can be viewed as a sequence of activities performed collectively to achieve specific objectives.

These sequences of activities include set of inputs, decision branch nodes and resultant output. A flowchart can be used to visualize the sequence of events of a process either performed sequentially or in parallel.

During Quality Planning, flowcharting can help the project team to anticipate quality problems that might occur during a process. An awareness of potential problem can result in development of test procedures or approaches for dealing with them.

Below is a sample Flowchart:

3. Control Charts 

Control Chart graphically helps you to determine if the process performance is within acceptable limit. A control chart can be used to monitor project performance figures such as cost or schedule variance and also many other performance metrics.

Control charts can be used to 

1. Check the stability of the process
2. Monitor the conditions which may require the team to react
3. Monitor consecutive run of results in any pattern 

A Control Chart will have the following components of a process:

• Upper Control Limit
• Lower Control Limit
• Mean/Average

4. Histograms 

Histograms are bar charts. Histograms are used to show the frequency or number of occurrences of a particular event. Histograms are also used to show the number of defects being contributed by different root causes.

A sample histogram is shown below.

5. Pareto Chart

Pareto chart is an ordered histogram. The histograms are plotted in a descending order of frequency showing each root cause and corresponding number of defects contributed by them. The Pareto chart is based on the famous 80-20 rule.

It helps to focus on the significant root causes and focus on eliminating them.

Pareto charts: 

1. Helps focus attention to the most critical issues.
2.  Prioritizes potential cause of the problem.
3.  Helps identify the critical few from the uncritical many.

6. Scatter Diagram

Scatter diagram is a statistical tool which is used to show Co-relation between 2 different variables. The scatter diagram graphs pairs of numerical data, with one variable on each axis, to look for a relationship between them. If the variables are correlated, the points will fall along a line or curve. The better the correlation, the closer the points will be around the line.

For example, an organization may like to check if there is a co-relation between the hours of training given to employees and the number of defects being created by them.

7. Run Chart 

A Run Chart is a line graph showing data points over time. By collecting and charting data over time, you can find trends or patterns in the process. The data may show:

• Variances
• Trends (performance improving, deteriorating, or remaining constant)

Many organizations apply run charts to track whether their key performance indicators (KPIs) behave in expected lines.

This post was originally featured on Knowledgehut. For more chapters of the LenovoPRO Community Project Management Tutorial provided by Knowledgehut, click here. 

What are your thoughts on part one of this Project Management tutorial series?  Do you have any questions about this lesson or about topics you’d like to see covered in the future? 

Leave your comments below to kick off the conversation!