4 Principles for Reaching Your Project Management Goals

Cornelius Fichtner, PMP is a noted PMP expert. He has helped over 20,000 students prepare for the PMP Exam with The Project Management PrepCast at http://www.pm-prepcast.com and he guides PMI credential holders on earning PDUs with The PDU Insider at http://www.pdu-insider.com.

  Career Development  

Whether your goal is passing the PMP exam, becoming a better team leader or effectively managing a demanding workload, we all have something we could be better at. Sometimes it is hard to find a focus for your goals--especially when project managers today have so many other demands on their time beyond personal development. However, if you want to get better at anything, you have to work at it--and project management is no different.

Here are four principles for reaching your project management goals. If you follow these, you are bound to make progress toward a great career!

1. Understand leadership and management. “Management is traditionally very focused on tasks, events, processes and resources,” said Susanne Madsen, Project and Program Manager, Mentor and Coach. “Management will deliver an outcome on time, on budget to the required quality, and we use processes to do that.” Management-speak talks about resources, time and money, and if you are a project manager, those are probably terms that you use a lot, too.

“Leadership is much more people-focused,” Madsen said. “It’s about delivering something--let’s say a project outcome--through people.” Leadership is about motivating people to deliver, not necessarily getting outcomes by pushing people toward a goal with incentives like salary increases.

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