By Aruna Kooragamage - PMP

PMP / CAPM preparation course is a mandatory requirement to sit the PMP / CAPM credential exam. Once a person gets through the PMP or CAPM exam, credential holders have to face a big challenge to maintain their credentials.

It is also exposure or opportunity for credential holders to extend their services to the society, share their knowledge with other professionals and continue learning for self. Every professional needs to focus on continuous education and knowledge upgrade. This is mandatory in any profession as the technology and concepts are being changed very fast.

While focusing on project management and related technical skills it is very important to have continuous attention on developing the soft skills. Soft skills is a sociological term relating to a person's Emotional intelligence quotient, the cluster of personality traits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, friendliness, and optimism that characterize relationships with other people.
Soft skills complement hard skills (part of a person's IQ) and technical skills, which are the occupational requirements of a job and many other activities.

It has been suggested that in a number of professions soft skills may be more important over the long term than occupational skills. For example, in the legal profession the ability to deal with people effectively and politely, more than their mere occupational skills, can determine the professional success of a lawyer.

Some of the soft skills which project managers should have are listed below.

• Participate in a team or team
  building
• Lead a team
• Conducting workshops
• Ability to handle cultural differences
• Teaching / Coaching skills
• Negotiation skills
• Motivate others
• Make decisions
• Solve problems
• Observe forms of etiquette
• Interact with others
• Maintain meaningless conversation (small talk)
• Maintain meaningful conversation (discussion/debate)
• Defuse arguments with timing, instructions and polite, concise language
• Feign interest and speak intelligently about any topic

Anybody who is interested to improve soft skills need understand themselves deeply. Understanding our self is the most difficult activity sometimes.

Certain negative behaviours of a person may prevent improving certain essential soft skills. Most of our behaviours are governed by attitudes. Most of us think attitudes are difficult to change. It is true that you cannot change your attitudes on most occasions but if you pay attention to beliefs which govern your attitudes, they are the secret of dealing with them.

Beliefs can be defined in many ways. Sometimes beliefs is something accepted by the mind that something is true or real, often underpinned by an emotional or spiritual sense of certainty. Sometimes it may be due to religious faith. However you may need to find the root cause for these beliefs if you need an impactful change in your attitudes.

Where Technical skills are concerned, it is important to develop the skills on project portfolio management (PPM). The fundamental objective of the PPM process is to determine the optimal mix and sequencing of proposed projects to best achieve the organization's overall goals, typically expressed in terms of hard economic measures, business strategy goals, or technical strategy goals, while honouring constraints imposed by management or external real world factors.

Typical attributes of projects being analyzed in a PPM process include each project's total expected cost, consumption of scarce resources (human or otherwise) expected timeline and schedule of investment, expected nature, magnitude and timing of benefits to be realized, and relationship or inter-dependencies with other projects in the portfolio.

The key challenge to implementing an effective PPM process is typically securing the mandate to do so. Many organizations are culturally inured to an informal method of making project investment decisions.
However this approach to making project investment decisions has led many organizations to unsatisfactory results.

Therefore organizations must have more methodical and transparent decision making process. That demand has in turn created a commercial marketplace for tools and systems which facilitate such a process.

Some commercial vendors of Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software emphasize their products' ability to treat projects as part of an overall investment portfolio. PPM advocates see it as a shift away from one-off, ad hoc approaches to project investment decision making.

Most PPM tools and methods attempt to establish a set of values, techniques and technologies that enable visibility, standardization, measurement and process improvement. PPM tools attempt to enable organizations to manage the continuous flow of projects from concept to completion. Treating a set of projects as a portfolio would be, in most cases, an improvement on the ad hoc, one-off analysis of individual project proposals.

Other areas which project management professional can focus on are voluntary work.
It is the practice of people working on behalf of others without being motivated by financial or material gain. Volunteering is generally considered an altruistic activity, intended to promote good or improve human quality of life. People also volunteer to gain skills without requiring an employer's financial investment.

Volunteering takes many forms and is performed by a wide range of people. Many volunteers are specifically trained in the areas they work such as medicine, education, or emergency rescue.
Others volunteer on an as-needed basis, such as in response to a natural disaster.In summary, continuation of Professional practices in the day to day work is the key to the success of any Profession.

Visit: www..pmicolombo.org/saarc