When you look at soft skills you start looking at different dimensions and the PM’s environment. Soft skills are defined as the managerial or interpersonal skills used to resolve project incidents. You need soft skills for managing different tasks. Knowing that certain people may like to perform certain jobs can help you organize whose performing which task during your resource assignment.  You can use them to when managing your own career. They can aid you in answering questions like, “should I stay with this company” or “how can I work on projects I want to work on instead of projects assigned to me.” Managing these incidents requires more softer skills. Managing yourself is another great example. When you come into work for the day, are you a morning person? Are you an evening person? A person can optimize their performance by knowing their own motivations and habits.

In the IT project realm, the most important dimension of soft skills is knowing how to manage others. This is because most of your job involves convincing other people and bringing them onboard with your project. These individuals may include your superiors or subordinates. They could be in your company, contractors, or people at an outsourcing or off-shoring site. You could be in a situation where you are managing your clients or vendors, or even both.

Soft skills are becoming just as important as the hard skills, and even more so in some cases. Today there are projects that span multiple organizations across many different countries and time zones. As a result, the ability to work with people in other domains is very critical so technical skills alone are not sufficient enough at the PM level. In fact, looking back on some of the examples we have used, it is often the case today that you are trying to manage people who do not report to you. They may actually belong to another company so motivating them to perform a certain task can be a challenge. Given all the demands on projects, one reason projects succeed is because the people just commit to getting the job done no matter the circumstances. A lack of resources or time does not equate to failure in their minds. Getting people to that mindset, however, can be very difficult.

To read more about soft skills and other project management tools, read our IMF Report: Soft Skills and Their Place in Project Management.