What it takes to evolve as a successful project manager?

As project management remains to be one of the top roles in an IT organization, it also remains as one of the tough-to-get profession in the current context of competition. Several traditional project management approaches emphasize on extended-term planning and a determined focus on stability for managing the risks. But in todays business world, managers who lead various complex projects often tends to combine the traditional approaches and “agile” methods which they believe to get more flexibility — and better results.

In today’s competitive and dynamic world, the key challenge a project manager is coping with is the frequent and unexpected issues and events. Despite the meticulous planning, risk assessments and management processes, the project managers often encounters, on a day-to-day basis, events and issues of failure of works at the project site, also the bankruptcy of an important vendor, a contradiction found with the guidelines suggested by two engineering consultants or the modifications in requirements of customers. Events like these can be categorized in accordance with their level of predictability; these events which were anticipated and impacts of whose were much valuable than expected and also the events which couldn"t be predicted; and also events that could be predicted. All the 3 types of events can pose problematic and that needs to be addressed appropriately by the respective project manager. 

Coping with many unexpected issues and events demands a proper organizational culture which could let the project manager in exercising a great amount of flexibility. 

Constant debate on the wider project management job role with regards to the need and necessity of flexibility, differing from the traditional approaches, often emphasizes on the project"s success and its dependency on the stability. But in accordance with the traditional approaches, the success factors of the project can be only achieved by constantly focusing on the strategies of planning, controlling and the management of risks. Although the familiarity of this kind of approach had increased sharply across the industries, the research and experiments covering on various variety of projects keep consistently revealing the poor performance. 

Also, the debate on whether the newly followed project management approaches being popular across the software industry exists. The so known as the agile method asserts that the success of the project is depending on enormous flexibility achieved throughout the life of the project.