Manage a project, team or process can be hard and responsible work. At the same time, however, it brings a feeling of satisfaction. Especially if you do the management craft honestly and with passion.

Let’s go through the list of skills that are indispensable for managerial craftsmanship.

Important skills

• general management skills – project management basics, meetings organization (scheduling, preparing a meeting, managing a meeting, documenting meeting, meeting follow-up), Office software (be it MS Office, GSuite, iWork or Libre)
• IT management – agile management, agile culture, development & operations terminology
• product management – base usability analysis, user stories, prototyping, prioritization
  • agile product ownership – user stories, understanding agile&scrum
  • service design
• sales management – sales enablement, motivating sales, sales terminology, Zoho CRM – sales management part

• change management – designing & implementing change, setting & maintaining new processes, presentation skills
• marketing management – managing marketing projects, understanding of marketing terminology
• data-driven management – financial analysis, Metabase, SQL, maybe some BI tools (on usage level, not on development level)
• general problem solving skills – brainstorming, designing processes, ability to design a process dataflow in Notion, AirTable, Excel/GSheets/Numbers
• decision making skills – PAPRIKA, weighted matrix, decision making trees, ROI estimation

7-Step Next Big Things process

Below are seven steps to successful organizational change in a project. It is inspired by PDCA cycle, Toyota A3, Design thinking, checklists, project & process management.

 

Prioritization techniques

The skill of prioritization is essential for managerial work. This can be facilitated by several techniques, such as ICE scoring where we use formula:

Impact * Certainty / Effort = ICE score

Impact should be evaluation of:

• How much money it will bring (in $ per year or per deals brought)
• How much will company grow (in %)
• There can be other reasons like prolonging average time in company

Important sidenote: we can go to inaccurate measures like in thousands of $.

1 = $1000 per year

1 = increase of size of company that brings turnover $1000 or given profit by profitability ratio (that’s somewhere between 33-45 %)

Certainty shows how sure we are we will achieve the goal

Certainty depends on multiple factors:

• Statistic behind: is it going to be somewhere around (N) or all-or-nothing (chance of ALL / 2) or somewhere around or maybe nothing (N / 2)
• Control: Can we control the output? → range (chance of happening externally … to ability to cause the result)
• Risk: Can we lower the expense in case we will not succeed? → we will divide certainty by ability to reduce expense in case of problem

Overall we should have preference for activities where we have control over output, we can reduce the risk in case of no success

Certainty = underlying statistic * control / risk-freeness

Effort shows our expenses including:

• Time of people (time per year) = every 1 FTE is worth 55 points per year
• Money spent = 1 points = $1000 spent per year

Decision making

PAPRIKA is an acronym for Potentially All Pairwise RanKings of all possible Alternatives. It’s a patented method based on the principle that users express their preferences with regard to the relative importance of criteria or attributes of interest for a given decision or choice, by comparing (ranking) alternatives. The PAPRIKA method involves a number of simple questions based on your expertise and subjective judgment. Each question is based on the choice between two hypothetical alternatives defined only on two criteria or attributes at the same time and involving a tradeoff.

Leadership checklist 

We have prepared a leadership checklist for you. With the help of this worksheet, you can easily verify your current situation. May you’ll find gaps in your skills that you can work on. And that’s a great opportunity!