The Top Soft Skills You Need To Succeed In A Salesforce Role: Project management

Project management is crucial for any organization or team to achieve their specific goals within a given timeframe. The success of a project often depends on the project management style employed, which determines the approach taken in managing the project, how the team interacts with one another, and the stakeholders involved.

Our research found that project management, alongside communication and problem solving, were the top three soft skills that Salesforce professionals need to succeed in their role.

In this instalment of our series: “The top soft skills you need to succeed in a Salesforce role”, we’ll explore different project management styles, their characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages.

> Waterfall

> Agile

> Lean

> Scrum

> Kanban

> Six Sigma

Project management can bring a wide range of benefits to organizations, including:

• Improved efficiency - streamlining processes and allocate resources more effectively.
• Better communication - between team members and stakeholders, which can help prevent misunderstandings, delays, and other communication-related issues.
• Enhanced collaboration - encouraging team members to work together towards a common goal and share their expertise and knowledge.
• Improved risk management - project management techniques can help identify and mitigate risks early on in a project, reducing the likelihood of costly mistakes or failures.
• Increased stakeholder satisfaction - by keeping stakeholders informed and involved throughout the project, project management can help ensure that the final product or service meets their expectations and needs.
• Improved project outcomes - clear goals and defined timelines can improve the likelihood of achieving successful project outcomes.

Which management style will work best for your project?

Waterfall

Waterfall is one of the oldest and most traditional project management styles. It’s a linear approach that follows a sequence of phases, where each phase must be completed before the next one can begin:

1.      Requirement gathering and analysis

2.      Design

3.      Implementation or development

4.      Testing

5.      Deployment or launch

6.      Maintenance and support

The waterfall model is commonly used in construction, engineering, and software development projects. It’s easy to understand; however, its rigid structure can make it difficult to adapt to changing requirements or unforeseen challenges.

Agile

Agile is a modern and flexible project management style that emphasizes collaboration, communication, and adaptability. Its customer-centric approach focuses on delivering value to the end-user.

Agile is widely used in software development projects, but it can also be applied to other industries. One of the biggest advantages of Agile is that it allows for continuous improvement and feedback. However, it can be challenging to implement and requires a significant cultural shift in the organization.

Lean

Lean is a project management style that aims to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. It is a holistic approach that considers the entire value chain and focuses on continuous improvement.

Lean is commonly used in manufacturing, but as with Agile, it can also be applied to other industries. The main advantage of Lean is that it helps to reduce waste and increase efficiency, which leads to cost savings and higher quality products, but it may take time to implement successfully.

Scrum

Scrum is a specific type of Agile methodology that is popular in software development projects. It is based on the principles of transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

Scrum teams work in sprints, which are time-boxed periods of work. The team collaborates daily and reviews their progress at the end of each sprint.

Scrum is highly adaptable and flexible, which makes it an excellent choice for complex and uncertain projects. Since it requires a high level of discipline and structure, this method can be challenging to maintain.

Kanban

Kanban is a project management style that focuses on visualizing and managing workflow. It’s a methodology that originated in manufacturing but has since been adopted in various industries, including software development and marketing.

Kanban emphasizes the continuous delivery of small increments of work, which helps to reduce waste and increase efficiency.

Kanban is a simple and effective project management style, but it may not be suitable for large and complex projects.

Six sigma

Six Sigma is a data-driven project management style that aims to eliminate defects and improve quality. It is a structured approach that follows the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) process.

Six Sigma is commonly used in manufacturing, but it can also be applied to other industries. The main advantage of Six Sigma is that it helps to reduce variability and increase quality, however, it requires a high level of statistical knowledge and may not be suitable for all projects.

Read more of our findings about the skills Salesforce professionals need in our blog post here.