Hard and Soft Project

Management Skills
 3 years ago

 / FAQ Answers     Personal Effectiveness     Project Management Basics     Project

Management Courses

You have probably heard of ‘hard and soft Project

Management’. In fact, you may have come across an artificially
concocted debate about the merits of hard versus soft Project
Management. In this article, I want to assess what the terms
hard and soft mean, and why they are not in opposition to each
other. 
 What are Hard and Soft Project
Management Skills?
At its simplest, when you hear the terms hard and soft project management,
they are usually referring to:

Hard Project Management

The technical skills of analysis, planning, tracking, and problem solving. These
skills are highly project management focused and are often numerical,
logical, and data oriented. The kind of personality traits that support
implementing them well are discipline, rationality, and cool rigour.

Soft Project Management

The people-oriented skills of empathy, collaboration, influence, and
leadership. These skills tend to have a much wider business and social
application. They are marked by high levels of ’emotional intelligence’ which
is usually taken to be a combination of:
 Self awareness

 Self-control

 Empathy for others’ feelings

 Social skills

So the sort of personality we see here is gregarious or caring, but certainly

good with people and enjoys being and working with them.
 Hard and Soft Project Management Skills

Don’t these two personalities conflict?

This is an obvious question to ask. Many models of personality set up four
types:

 the hard-driving getting-things-done person

 the coldly analytical rational-thinking person

 the socially alert caring-sharing person

 the openly gregarious influential-networker person

It is easy to see our hard and soft project management skills in the top two
and the bottom two of these. But none of those models (when explained
properly) seek to place you or I firmly into one box. Many people do have a
style that make us more most comfortable. That’s true. but we can all be
flexible, and many of us happily adopt more than one personality style.
 Sometimes you prefer different styles in different situations. You can also
move form one style to another.  Maybe your ‘style’ is a combination.

What seems to me to be true is this:

Good Project Management is

Hard and Soft Project Management
This is to say, that if you want to be a good project manager, you need to be
able to deploy hard and soft project management skills. You need to be able
to choose which ones to focus on at any time. And you also need to be able to
switch quickly, or even combine hard and soft project management
approaches, as the situation merits.

To be a good #project manager, you need to be able to

deploy hard and soft project management skills CLICK TO
TWEET

Take a look, for example, at why projects fail. In two recent posts, I
introduced Ten Points of Project Failure.
1. Project Definition

2. Governance

3. Planning

4. Politics

5. Stakeholder Engagement

6. Resources

7. Project Management

8. Testing and Quality

9. Implementation
10. External Factors

Some of these are clearly related to hard project management skills – 3, 8,

and 9. Others seem strongly linked to soft project management skills – 2, 4,
and 5. You can easily see the influence of both hard and soft project
management in the remainder. But even the clearer cases have both hard and
soft project management skills wrapped into them.

On the other hand, you can also see a good balance of hard and soft Project
Management skills in both our Seven Vital Project Management Priorities, and
our Ten Critical Things to Learn about Project Management.

A Spectrum of Project Management Skills

I am not even sure that hard and soft project management skills truly
represent two different things. Rather, I refer to think of them as two ends of a
spectrum. Like red and blue, they are easy to distinguish. But there is stuff in
between that is may start as hard, but have a bit of soft, or seem soft, but with
a little hard edge. And there are some project management skills that are
certainly both logical and emotional in nature. Orange is mostly red. Green is
mostly blue. And yellow is somewhere in between.

The Hard and Soft Project Management

Skills Spectrum
Let’s take a list of Project Management skills and place them on a spectrum.
This is not an attempt at an exhaustive list. Nor is the placing on the spectrum
anything more than my subjective assessment. The purpose is purely to
illustrate my point.
 Hard and Soft Project Management Skills Spectrum

How Can You Develop Your Hard and

Soft Project Management Skills?
There are two approaches to developing your hard and soft project
management skills:

1. The Integration Approach

2. The Individual Approach

Let’s take a look at each in turn.

The Integration Approach to Developing Hard

and Soft Project Management Skills
In this approach – which a I recommend for new and intermediately
experienced project managers – you develop the two skill areas together.
My core project management courses are all designed to emphasise how
the whole spectrum fits together, and how you can’t separate the two ends.
However, as you move from our more basic to more comprehensive core
courses, you will find a greater proportion of soft skills content. The entry level
core video program is the Project Manager’s Fast Start Program. It is clearly
focused on the basic hard skills, with all the core soft skills integrated. In the
mid-tier Project Manager’s Skills Mastery Program, you will find more material
on stakeholder engagement, and governance. There is also some new
material about team leadership. In the most comprehensive core course, The
Project Manager’s Immersion Program, there is a lot of material on the
leadership, stakeholder engagement, and psychological dimensions of project
management. Indeed, I suspect there is a far greater proportion of soft
management skills here, than you will find in a vast majority of commercial
(and academic) project management courses.

The Individual Approach to Developing Hard

and Soft Project Management Skills
As you improve your Project Management skills and experience, you will want
to focus on your development more tightly. Now, you will want to select the
topics where you can get most leverage for your learning. This will depend on
you past experiences and what you are are already good at. It will also
depend on the nature of the projects you are doing, and what you think are
the priorities for improving your successful delivery.
  to download your free report:
CLICK HERE

'The Nine Steps of a Project Management Career'

Now is the time for a more individual skills based approach to learning. This is
our phase two objective. We plan to create a range of programs based on all
the possible project management skills and project manager’s personal skills
that will make you a first rate project manager.

Project Management Skills

First, we will be starting with Project Management skills. We are planning a
wide range of topics. Consequently, we would value your contribution to
helping us decide what would be most valuable to you. Please do help us
decide what to work on first, by responding to a short questionnaire.
Topics in our plan include:

 Risk Management

 Project Definition

 Procurement and Cost Control

 Project Planning

 Benefits ManagementProject Resource Management

 Introduction to Agile Project Management

 Change Management / Leadership

 Sponsorship and Governance

 Project Team Leadership / Management

 Stakeholder Engagement

 Project Communications
 Quality Management for Projects

 Project Control during Delivery

 Introduction to PRINCE2

 Project Change Control

Project Manager’s Personal Skills

We will then be turning our attention to Project Manager’s personal
skills. Successful Project Management relies on a wide range of personal
effectiveness skills. We are planning programs on topics like:

 Assertiveness

 Influence

 Delegation

 Personal Impact

 Personal Time Management

 Presentation Skills

 Workplace Political Acumen

 Resilience and Stress Management – self and others

Some of our Best Articles, for Hard and

Soft Project Management Skills
 Hard Skills
 The Ten Critical Things to Learn about Project Management
 Clear Project Brief
 Project Management Essentials
 The Secret to Getting Your Project Documentation Right
 Take Control with John Boyd’s OODA Loop
 How to Define your Project Scope
 Do you Know How to Craft the Perfect Project Name?

Soft Skills
 How I Create Exceptional Project Collaboration
 Bruce Tuckman and How Groups Develop
 The Secret to Reading Minds with Perceptual Positions
 The Easy Way to Keep my Boss Happy
 Kurt Lewin’s Freeze Phases
 Great Big Guide to a fabulous Project Kick-off Meeting
 Power Bases in Projects
 Interpersonal Skills for Project Managers

Building Your Project Career

If you are committed to building a Project career, you will need to learn both
hard and soft Project Management skills. Plan your own professional self-
development around the idea of balance… I would not necessarily counsel
that you aim for an even balance of time spent on each. This to me seems like
an ‘input measure’. What Project Managers should be focusing on is
outcomes. The outcome measure is your balance of hard and soft Project
Management skills, so balance your learning and practice efforts to achive the
output  you want. Balanced skills.
I think this is going to be an essential thing for you to demonstrate, if you want
to get a Project Management job role. And, in particular, you should be ready
to discuss your perspective on this balance at a Project Management job
interview too.

What do You Think?

Please do use the comments below to let us know what you think are the
most important hard and soft Project Management skills.

 
 
 
 
 
 
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About the Author Mike Clayton

Dr Mike Clayton is one of the most successful and in-demand project
management trainers in the UK. He is author of 14 best-selling books,
including four about project management. He is also a prolific blogger and
contributor to ProjectManager.com and Project, the journal of the Association
for Project Management. Between 1990 and 2002, Mike was a successful
project manager, leading large project teams and delivering complex projects.
In 2016, Mike launched OnlinePMCourses.

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