Learn how to duck and cover? Learn how to blame Al from accounting for project errors? Start to berate your team for their failures, which you had absolutely nothing to do with? Just how do you excel at project management? Before you throw Al under the bus, consider this list of 10 must-dos that will help you lead more efficient, effective projects.

In order to ensure optimal success at program and/or project management, you need to develop and foster the following competencies:

1. Business Leadership: Firms with effective management consistently and overpoweringly outperform those without strong business leadership. Leadership is not a fixed quality; rather, the best leaders tailor their strategies to specific situations and teams.
2. Business Analysis: Whether you have a separate Business Analyst or a PM who handles both roles, this job involves identifying pressing needs and determining possible solutions. According to Meta Group Research, 60 – 80 percent of project failures are directly attributable to poor analysis, management, and requirements gathering.
3. Strategic Management: What do we need to do in order to remain viable? To increase sustainability and competitiveness? Strategic management makes targeted decisions based on these questions and determines appropriate action.
4. Change and Process Management: No one likes change; we say we do, but we don’t. Change needs to be as carefully managed as any other business process, if not more so. Preparing, implementing, and reinforcing change is essential.
5. Systems Analysis: If your business is a puzzle, you have to look at how all of those pieces work together. Do they create a complete, coherent whole, or is there a breakdown somewhere in the system?
6. Transition Management: This can be similar to change management in that it helps pave the way for change and then help integrate it into the corporate culture. This can be helpful for larger-scale changes, such as acquisitions, mergers, or new leadership.
7. Performance and Testing Management: How’s this working? Performance management involves evaluating the efficacy of teams, processes, and even drill down into individual team members. Testing requires going back and checking: does this work as we expected? Is it meeting our needs, and does it align with corporate goals and objectives?
8. Risk Management: What do we want to accomplish? And what are the biggest obstacles standing in our way? Managing risk appropriately and proactively is essential to project success.
9. Communications: One of the biggest factors in project failures is lack of communication. Not only do team members need to communicate, this needs to be done across lines, from sponsors to managers to teams to stakeholders.
10. Training: Managers and team members need to be mentored on an ongoing basis as to best practices. Decision-making capability is critical, but a framework needs to be in place to allow for this to be done effectively.

That’s a lot to put on any project manager’s plate; but, fortunately, it need not – and should not – be clustered around one person. The entire purpose of the Centre of Excellence approach is that it creates accountability and decision-making authority throughout the team for more effective utilization of resources. And, perhaps, a little less stress for the PM. Well, maybe not, but there is a greater “risk” of success.