Having been worked as a project manager for about 2 months and taken care of several projects, I begin to realize what a good project manager should be like. I, of course, am far away from the good project manager.

1. Patience:

Good project manager should have a lot of patience. They should be patient with the all kinds of requirements proposed by the customer. For example, the urgent deadline, for every project, the customer requires very limited delivery time. It is very hard for the project manager to manage all the deadlines but in most circumstances they have to accept. They struggle and may even get the complaints about the quality and late delivery from the customer. On one hand, project manager is worried about the bad quality from the translator and on the other hand, project manager is worried about missing the deadline from the customer! Good project manager could overcome the worries and not panic at all with all the challenges in different projects. They have a good management of their translators and they have a good management of their customers.

2. Good with CAT tools:

Some customers require their projects to be done by specific CAT, like Trados 2007, Trados 2011, or Wordfast. Good project manager should have a good master of all these CAT tools because their translators might not know how to use the CAT Tool required by the customer. The project manager needs to help convert the file format into the one that the translators are familar and able to work. Many times, it takes a lot of time to find the translator who could handle specific CAT tool and if the things goes on, the deadline will be missed and the customer will be unpleasant so good project manager depends on themselves and their knowledge could solve the contradiction between the translator and the customer and finish the project successfully.

3. Good with document management

Project managers usually need to process several projects at the same time. For each project, there are many files and mails to manage. If they don’t have a way, they will spend quite a lot of time on finding files for mails. Good project managers know how to classify and manage the files and mails and they are very efficient because they have a system and flow built in their mind. Without a system and workflow, there will be a great mass and increase much time which you couldn’t even imagine in processing the project.