A good project manager needs to develop both hard skills and soft skills. 

While hard skills are all about knowledge and execution according to project management standards (e.g. knowing how to create a project charter, how to do agile etc.) and are easier to learn, soft skills need years practising and mastering. 

Some people are born with a natural ability to be great project managers, others need to cultivate their soft skills more. 

Regardless, to be a great project manager, today we will cover the top soft skills that you need. 

This is a continuation of my series on project management fundamentals - if you missed the previous topics, here's what we've covered before: the differences between projects and operations, projects, programmes and portfolios, the DARCI model for stakeholder engagement, how to run an effective project kick-off meeting, how to create a project charter and how to create a work breakdown structure.

Now to the top soft skills of a project manager.  

The Top Soft Skills of a Project Manager [Project Management Fundamentals]

I've always believed that you don't need to work harder or longer to achieve more. You simply need to work smarter. 

But that doesn't often come naturally or easily, especially if you are inexperienced and junior or still new to a role where you want to prove yourself.  

Over the years, I've managed to build some habits that allow me to work smarter and fewer hours and simultaneously to achieve more with better results and higher quality. 

Work less but achieve more? That sounds a bit impossible, right? 

But it's not. It's all a matter of knowing yourself and your strengths and then utilising them to the maximum when you're most productive so you do a certain task in the fastest manner possible at the right time. 

What's helped me are certain habits that I want to share with you today which you can try and see if they'll make you more productive to achieve more but in less time. 

How to Achieve More in Less Time - My 3 Key Tips

One of the reasons why I wrote the Inbound PR book was to help PR professionals open their eyes to the need for modern measurement and tangible proof of PR results. Inbound Marketing is terrific at showing the monetary value of marketing efforts so there's a lot that PR could learn. 

Measurement has always been a problem in PR. For years, PR pros have used fluffy metrics (and some continue doing so). Those metrics are not what C-level people care about, they're not what will get you budget. 

There's also been a lot of effort put in from the PR industry itself to solve this problem. 

One such example are the Barcelona Principles. They were first introduced by AMEC in 2010 and recently got their third refresh. 

Let's take a look at them: 

Barcelona Principles 3.0 [Infographic]

When you're trying to introduce Customer Success (or Customer Experience) in your organisation, you're obviously going to need a team. 

That team doesn't just consist of leadership people who will set up the vision and plan for the Customer Success organisation but you also need those who will take care of your customers, most often called Customer Success Managers (CSMs) - also called Client Success Managers or Customer Success Executives (CSEs). 

I've never held any of these titles exactly but I've spent a good few years working in similar roles albeit through partners (that's another topic we'll cover later) or directly taking care of customers when I was working in PR and digital agencies which is the same as if you're working in Customer Success in SaaS. But I've learned a lot about Customer Success over the years both by doing the job and by operationally executing on programs to enable Customer Success teams to do their jobs better. 

So from everything that I've experienced, I want to cover the key things CSMs need to be effective in their day-to-day. If you manage a CSM organisation, consider these especially if you're just setting it up. 

3 Things Customer Success Managers Need to Be Effective

Today, we continue with our project management fundamentals series. 

So far we've covered the differences between projects and operations as well as those between projects, programmes and portfolios, the DARCI model for stakeholder engagement followed by how to run an effective project kick-off meeting and lastly, how to create a project charter. 

Now, we'll look at another crucial piece of project management and probably my favourite one as I love looking at the details and planning the execution - the work breakdown structure or WBS. 

A work breakdown structure (WBS) is basically the breakdown of all deliverables into smaller components. The goal of the WBS is to organise the project team so they can work in manageable sections. 

The Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) by the Project Management Institute (PMI)defines the WBS as a “deliverable oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work to be executed by the project team.”

The WBS starts with the end objectives and then divides them into smaller components (called work packages) again and again in terms of size, duration and responsibilities until they can't be broken down any more and until they allow to complete all the steps necessary to achieve the objectives.