Why technical skills are needed? What technical skills are important for PM? How to develop them?

1. Why Project Manager needs technical
skills and How to develop them
Alex Galkin
Senior Manager, GFL

2. Why / What & How - Why Project Manager needs
technical skills?
- What are the main technical skills
needed?
- How to develop these skills?

3. WHY
What are the reasons to develop the technical
skills?

4. Better Understanding
of Communication
Channels between
different roles
- Designer
- Business Analyst
- Product Owner
- Developers
- DevOPS
- QA/QC

5. Ability to get faster
to the source of the
issue
- Review Console logs in browser
- Review API requests/responses
in the browser’s tools;
- Review server logs with
developers;
- Review data in the database;
- Check Config files with
developers/DevOPS/QA;
Especially when there is a critical
escalation

6. Ability to discuss
high level
requirements with
customer
- Get System (non-functional)
requirements from customer in
addition to the Business
(functional) requirements.
Essential for the pre-sales process

7. Make your team
members happier
"...the quality of workers’ lives is higher
if the supervisor is highly competent, in
a technical sense, at his or her job."
From “Boss Competence and Worker
Well-being” published on October 5,
2014
● Benjamin Artz, an Associate
Professor at the University of
Wisconsin at Oshkosh.
● Amanda Goodall, Ph.D., is a Senior
Lecturer in Management at Cass
Business School.
● Andrew J. Oswald, a Professor of
Economics and Behavioral Science
at the University of Warwick.
https://hbr.org/2016/12/if-your-boss-could-d
o-your-job-youre-more-likely-to-be-happy-at-w
ork
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26
8491675_Boss_Competence_and_Worker_We
ll-Being

8. WHY: Summary - Better communication inside the
team
- Ability to get more details about
the project at the early stages
from customer
- Ability to troubleshoot the issues
with your team faster
- Make team members happier

9. WHAT
What technical skills are needed?

10. Technical Support
Skills
- How Internet works? (TCP/IP,
DNS, WHOIS, Public vs Private IP
address, etc)
- How website works? (HTTP, FTP,
SSL, HTML, CSS, JS)
- How e-mail works? (SMTP,
POP3, IMAP)
- How to take screenshot on
different devices and
resize/crop that?
- SQL (basic commands)
- Unix (basic commands)
High level skills in different areas

11. QA related skills Ability to understand the difference
between Unit Tests, End-to-End tests,
Load test, Penetration tests; White
box testing vs Black box testing; etc.
...and ability to understand when and
what kind of tests you will need
during the project development
cycle.

12. Reporting related
technical skills
- Formulas in Excel
- Charts in MS Words and Excel

13. Design related
technical skills
- Ability to resize/crop image and
convert from one file type to
another;
- Understanding of the difference
between most popular image
types (JPEG, PNG, GIF, SVG);
- Ability to review and discuss
design changes with customer
through the tools like Figma or
InVision;

14. Delivery related
technical skills
- Ability to understand all scope
of the work needed to release
your website to production;
- Prepare the requirements for
submitting your mobile
application to Apple App Store
or Google Play.
Depends on the type of the project you
have

15. Development
related skills
- GIT (basic commands);
- Github (or Bitbucket, GitLab, etc)
to review pull requests.
- API Client for checking requests
and responses
- Browser’s Console Log

16. DevOps related
skills
- Ability to understand current
metrics of your system;
- Ability to review logs with the
team;
- Ability to check database
records during troubleshooting
the issue.

17. WHAT: Summary - Technical Support skills are the most
important for communication between
different roles;
- Reporting and QA/QC are important for
most of the day-to-day tasks;
- Development related skills will allow
you to keep an eye on the quality of the
Development process;
- DevOps and Delivery related skills will
help you to deliver the project in a time
and troubleshoot any issues faster;
- Design related skills will help you in
communication with Product Owner
and Designer.

18. HOW
How to develop or improve your technical skills

19. Online courses
Offline courses is also an option
though...
- Udemy
(https://www.udemy.com/)
- Prometheus
(https://prometheus.org.ua/)
- Open SAP (e.g. "Software
Design for Non-Designers",
"Getting Started with Data
Science", "Enterprise Machine
Learning in a Nutshell")
(https://open.sap.com/)
- Courses at Youtube (e.g. Hillel IT
School)

20. Internet articles
and blogs
- DOU (https://dou.ua/)
- FreeCodeCamp
(https://www.freecodecamp.org/)
- DEV Community (https://dev.to/)

21. Practice - Setup your own web server
using any provider (e.g. Digital
Ocean has great offer and you
can try that free for 60 days with
the limited credit)
- Create your MySQL database
and setup Wordpress there for
training purposes;

22. Conferences and
workshops
- Workshops will be helpful if you
want to understand something
specific in details (though not
needed in most cases);
- Technical conferences allow you
to understand the trends and get
feedback from the community
regarding different technologies;

23. HOW: Summary - Online courses to get understanding
regarding specific topic/technology;
- Conferences and Internet articles will
make you aware about trends and
feedback from other people regarding
specific technology;
- Practice should make it more clear how
the web solution actually works and
what is needed for that;
- Technical workshops may be useful
only when you want to understand
better one particular technology.

24. WHAT++
Extra trending technical skills

25. Trends - Cloud Providers (AWS, GCP,
Azure, Digital Ocean, etc)
- Microservices (Docker,
Kubernetes, etc)
- Blockchain
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine
Learning
- Big Data
- etc..

26. Trends: Summary - Most of the projects today use cloud
providers so having some knowledge
about them might be useful.
- Basic knowledge of Docker would be a
plus as well and it becomes more and
more popular.
- Other trends are very specific to the
project so unless you are 80%+ sure you
will work with them there is no need to
spend a lot of time on them (still good
to have genetic understanding of where
they can be used)

27. Thank you
Alex Galkin
alex.galkin@geeksforless.com