The Effective Remote PM

Brad Egeland is an IT/project management consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management and project management experience leading initiatives in manufacturing, government contracting, gaming and hospitality, retail operations, aviation and airline, pharmaceutical, start-ups, healthcare, higher education, not-for-profit, high-tech, engineering and general IT.

  Communications Management   Talent Management  

I have personally been running projects remotely for most of the past five years, so this is a topic that I’m fairly opinionated on. As always, I’d like to hear from our readers who have either managed a project remotely or worked on a project that was managed by a remote project manager; I’d like to hear the pros and cons that you experienced in this working situation.

I feel strongly that in order to be effective as a project manager, there are certain characteristics that a person needs to possess—otherwise, somewhere down the line they’re likely to realize that they’re not cut out to be a project manager. Some of those traits are: effective communicator, confident leader, organized professional, honest individual and top-notch resource manager. I may go into detail on these in yet another article, but for this post I’m more concerned about what it takes to be an effective remote project manager. It’s still a project management role, so some of the characteristics are the same. But I’d like to focus on four main qualities that the remote project manager must possess to effectively manage his or her projects and enhance the likelihood of project successes.

Other than the fact that I consider communication skills to be the most important tool for the project manager, these are listed in no particular order of …

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