Project management tips from the world's greatest project managers

There are many challenges that come with project management from managing a budget, adapting to changes, keeping on schedule, to leading a team. For this reason, there are large skill gaps between the average project manager and a great one. The best project managers do things far differently and have specialized knowledge that enables them to be superhumanly effective. Here are some collected tips from the world’s greatest project managers.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was known to be one of the greatest project managers in the tech world. Rather than try to separate parts of a project into individual departments, he created an environment that was collaborative. Everyone could keep up with every aspect of the project however detached the departments were in the roles they played.

Jobs’ process integrated all the departments, resulting in many benefits. One of these benefits was that everybody that worked for Apple understood how the company worked on a deep level. That meant that the customer service knew how to deal with technical problems, the marketing department understood how the software worked, etc. This is part of the reason why Apple has built such a large following.

Bill Gates

Bill Gates shared many of his project management philosophies in a Ted Talk which can be seen in this URL: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/bill_gates.html. One of the standout ideas is defining metrics and milestones to track the progress of a project. The concept is simple and is something that many great project managers use.

Here are some of the other gems you can take away from this talk:

- He starts with the results and identifies all the possible projects that can lead to the results. He compares all of them and goes with the one that can create the most impact towards the goal.

- He looks at what’s feasible in terms of scale and budget. After defining the limitations, he creates a plan for execution.

- He knows that projects change all the time. That’s why he remains flexible in the projects and plans for changes.

Richard Branson

Richard Branson’s Virgin brand is composed of 150 different companies and over 20,000 employees. His favorite advice for managing his businesses and projects has always been to hire smart. Richard Branson has admitted he start his projects by hiring people smarter than him. He carefully evaluates the people he hires and delegates everything to talented individuals, only keeping track when needed.

The lesson here is that you can’t do it all alone. Many project managers have a hard time passing off big responsibilities to others. The key to pulling it off and being able to trust somebody else is to know your team. Find the talented individual that can carry out important tasks and delegate so that you can focus on the bigger picture.

The one common thing that the world’s greatest project managers have in common is mindset. They have strong beliefs in how things should be organized and how they should operate. This all comes from experience and experimentation. Every project manager should manage a project according to his or her philosophy, but keep an open mind for learning, growing, adapting, and experimenting.

About the author: Sally writes for Milestone UK who specialise in Primavera courses and Oracle training in the UK, to learn more about their enterprise solutions.