What Does A Project Supervisor Do?

The project supervisor will oversee all aspects of a project from its inception to completion. One of the key functions fulfilled by the project supervisor is the hiring and training of employees. They must interview and appoint qualified candidates to perform the crucial jobs to complete the project.

They must ensure that new recruits work in a manner conducive to budget concerns. This can be accomplished by developing as well as implementing training seminars. Employee performance management on a periodic basis is also part of the project supervisor’s job.

They oversee and review employee performance, offer constructive feedback based on their observations, and report findings to management if needed.

What Are The Other Responsibilities Of A Project Supervisor?

Other project supervisor responsibilities include:

• Managing project budgets,
• Responding to labour requests,
• Managing product development,
• Establishing department goals and objectives,
• Managing logistics by ensuring that labour, materials, and equipment requests are completed correctly and are within the project budget.

Working closely with product development teams, the project supervisor must ensure an end-product which can be sold and that is beneficial to customer and market needs. Project supervisors manage and analyse all the records of the product development centre and offer daily/weekly/monthly product development progress reports to management.

Assembling the input received from all levels, a project supervisor offers suggestions and implements changes to products or services. The project supervisor is also responsible for managing customer service issues by working closely with account management teams to assess client needs.

The project supervisor must make sure that all requests logged by the customers and account teams are completed in an accurate, timely and reasonable manner. To help the customer understand how the product fits their needs and how to use it, the project sup0ervisor could facilitate product training sessions. During these sessions, these supervisors would receive feedback on product performance and use this knowledge to formulate innovative solutions to improve product functionality.

What Skills Does A Project Supervisor Need?

Project supervisors need to be organised and be able to think on their feet in order to be successful. When it comes to technical skills, project supervisors have to possess subject matter expertise in their area of employment. For instance, those who work in construction have construction expertise.  Project supervisors use this expertise to ensure that employees complete project components correctly.

For soft skills, project supervisors have to be excellent communicators. Part of their job is keeping their lower-level employees inspired, which requires the ability to build rapport and trust. Finally, they have to thrive in a deadline-driven environment.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you want to become a project supervisor, or any other person in the project management value chain (specifically in the media industry) then you need to do our Project Management For The Media Course. Learn more about this here.