Project manager best behaviors - or how to tell if you're doing a good job
By Sarah Gilbert

Project management can be a thankless job. When the project is going well, people often focus on the whole team, itself, or the importance of the outcome of the project. When the project is going badly, the project manager can often be called out on the carpet, berated and sent back to their desk to fix things. It’s easy to feel like there are more kicks than compliments for project management work.

So, if you are feeling down, there are some ways to figure out if you are still doing a good job in spite of the red stoplights in your project status report.

Your first clue about whether you are a good project manager is, of course, whether your project is on schedule, within budget and if it has avoided any significant issues. But even the best project managers sometimes have difficult or unsuccessful projects. So here is a list of ways to tell whether you are succeeding in your role:

• Project stakeholders and team members come to you with questions about the project and you have answers or know how to get them. 
• You learn more and are more excited when you talk to people on your team than when you are consulting or updating your project plan. 
• You are rarely or never caught off guard when you uncover a new risk on your project. You are also the first to know about the risk. 
• You are giving the same fact-based information to everyone involved in or interested in your project. 
• You don’t have one version of project status for your team and another for your customer. 
• You tailor project management processes and tools to meet the needs of your team. You involve your team in doing this. 
• When you learn something new about your project you think “who else needs to know this?” and then you make it a priority to tell them. 
• Your peers consult you when they are struggling with a project-management related issue. The PMO consults you about best practices. 
• You know how and why your project, when completed, will have a positive impact on the company or your customer. You can easily explain this to anyone who asks. 
• People request your services to help them plan meetings, events or other activities that require an organized person with good communication skills. They express relief when you agree to help. 
• You find yourself employing change request processes on almost every project, because you know when change is happening and how to trace it. 

A good project manager isn’t someone who avoids pitfalls and experiences smooth sailing with every project. Rather, a good project manager knows what to do when problems arise and how best to get the team and the project moving in the right direction.

Sarah Gilbert is a project management consultant and can be reached at
sarah.gilbert@what-if-project.com.

Filed under Project Management - General