I recently attended a project management seminar in which one of the speakers noted that a project manager must be systematic and innovative.
The systematic part is a no-brainer; in order to be successful at managing a project, a project manager must understand what step goes before another step. A systematic approach by its nature is linear; it may be multiple paths performed simultaneously, but each individual path is still linear. But the innovative part may not come as naturally to many project managers.
The act of innovating is defined as "the introduction of new things or methods". In IT, we know that there is always a better way; the same can be said for how we manage a project. There are aspects of a company's culture, personalities of key stakeholders, constraints and limitations that call for a project manager to innovate.
For instance, you should view the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) standards as important guidelines but not as exact rules on how to manage every detail of the project. Also, you should constantly challenge yourself to come up with a new, more efficient way of doing something. Innovative project managers take "think time" to look at the challenge from multiple angles and truly challenge how they have always done things.
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