Serious Soft Skills

Project management is not always considered a soft skill. Hosts Dr. Tobin Porterfield and Bob Graham discuss its role as a soft skill and discuss the criticism.
What Project Management Is
Bob Graham ‘1:06': We should probably start out first off with defining what project management is and explaining why it fits into our list of soft skills because most people, or some people, might be thinking that they can take a course of project management in college. Why are you saying it's a soft skill? 
Dr. Tobin Porterfield ‘1:23': Let's start that up. Let's start with what project management is because we often see the term a lot. We see it in job advertisements. It's prevalent out there. The term is often misapplied and misunderstood. A lot of time people say that it's time management. Project management certainly has elements of managing your time and your resources. But it is another animal from what we consider time management.
Routine Tasks
Porterfield ‘1:55': When I look at project management and I teach a lot of courses on it, I start my students with “Look, our whole lives, our work lives, our home lives — you can really bring everything you do into two areas: either routine things, the things I do everyday. I fill out my timesheet, I check my voice mail, I go through my email, I do my report, I do month-end close. There are things we do that are routine, that we just do. It's what we do in our business world that just keeps the dollars flowing in. We sell appliances or we develop apps and we launch them. It becomes very routine.
When It Becomes a Project
Porterfield ‘2:31': But when something moves to the elevation of being a project, that's important. To be a project, it has to meet a couple of criteria. It has to have a start date and an end date. There has to be a time component. We need to get this done. A big one is that there needs to be a specific deliverable, a definable thing, so that when we are done we know what we really accomplished. The third one is a really easy one. That is that it uses resources. But almost everything we do uses resources. I kid my students by saying that me losing 30 pounds is something that needs to happen and it's a project. But it's not really a project because there isn't a start and end date. So it's not a project. In reality, it's never going to happen. That's what we see with organizations. They need to keep the routine going. They need to keeping doing what they do.
Executing projects is how they move the organization forward.
Porterfield ‘3:30': It's how they launch that new project, open that new location. For us as individuals, an individual project for us might be to complete a certification, to write that book that you always wanted to write. Projects fit that definition of start and end date, use resources and a definable outcome. They need to be treated differently. There's a mechanical skill set to project management.
People Skills in Project Management
Porterfield ‘4:00': There a whole lot of people skills issues that are in project management that in order to get things done that integration has to happen. That's one of the reason why it earned a place in our list of soft skills.
Graham ‘4:14': You looked at all of the academic literature you could find to create our list of 55 soft skills. Didn't you find some researchers who had clearly put project management in the list of soft skills, not technical or hard skills?
Porterfield ‘4:34': Yes. We didn't just put it under our list although it's an area that's important to us. Studies were done that said project management clearly is a soft skill. Some could make the case that it's not because in some fields like engi...