Project management Description: What is it?
Project management (PM) is one of those topics that seem more complicated and shrouded in mystery than it actually is. Simply put, project management is the process a business uses to get what it needs to do done. Another way to look at it is project management means monitoring how a business executes a strategic plan. In other words, PM keeps track of who is doing what, whether the project is on budget and on time, and ensuring everyone involved in the project stays focused on the goal. Although the style and parameters of project management can vary widely; typically, PM approaches all have a few things in common, and project managers, regardless of industry, tend to focus on these 4 parameters:
1. Resources
2. Time
3. Budget
4. Scope
Project management Resources:
Project managers view employees as resources that are allocated to perform specific tasks in order to complete the project. Utilizing this method inherently makes a given employee accountable for completing the task, but it also enables the project manager to determine if an employee has too many tasks to complete (which may slow down the timeline). It also highlights any employee on the team whose skills are underutilized and is available to contribute more toward bringing the project to a successful completion.
Project management Time:
Before any project is started, usually in the feasibility study/stage, project managers create a proposed timeline of events that includes milestones so every member of the project’s team has a feel for how it will take to complete the project. Timelines establish benchmarks every team member can consult, and the manager can use to keep the project moving towards completion. Timelines are useful tools to keep every team member on track.
Project management Budget:
PM are typically assigned some responsibility to ensure the project stays on budget; however, cost overruns seem all to common these days, but project managers monitor every aspect of the project’s cash burn rate to ensure nothing gets out of hand. Another important aspect of the budgeting aspect of PM is ensuring milestones are satisfactorily met before contractors and vendors are paid.
Project management Scope:
According to most professional project managers, scope may be the most important aspect of their job. In the most elemental form scope is just what the project is going to accomplish combined with how much time and money is used to get it done. However, in reality most projects are changed while underway for a myriad number of reasons: weather may cause construction delays, permitting problems; the customer decides they need a 3-car garage on the house instead of the proposed 2-car garage, etc.
If any aspect of the project’s scope changes the PM must ensure that one or more of the parameters of the project changes too. For example, suppose the project scope is to construct a 20K square foot building for $500K, but halfway through the construction process the customer decides they need to expand it to 30K feet. The PM must ensure the budget is increased appropriately, more employee resources are allocated (or the existing employees time and tasks) in a way that will allow the project to be completed to everyone’s satisfaction. The example above is an obvious case where changes need to be made to successfully complete a project; however, the scope of most projects change subtly in ways that are not easily seen in terms of the big picture. Professional project managers call this “scope creep,” and it defines the accumulation of small changes that don’t appear significant in themselves, but when lumped together at the end can sum up to a nasty surprise.
Project management Users: Who needs it?
Any business can benefit from the principles of project management theory and science. Whether your company produces software, batteries, or t-shirts, at some point in the business cycle a well-run business will find an opportunity to increase their revenue, production or storage capacity, or deploy new software across a number of different computers. Every one of these examples would benefit from the principles of project management.
If you need to expand capacity, change the structure of employee benefits, or if you have a project that will require the effort of multiple employees, vendors, contractors, or other types of jobs that requires the work of several other parties you can always have an idea what has been done, what’s left to do, and how much it has cost, by applying project management techniques. Features: What does it do?
Although managing a complex project may seem like a daunting task, there are a number of software tools that make project management easier. Most of them allow the manager to assign tasks to employee resources, keep track of schedules, and take the pulse of the project’s costs in one convenient place.
Many/most of them also provide a number of graphs, and statistics that allow the manager to visualize exactly what needs to be done to bring it to a successful completion.
Project management Benefits: What is achieved?
The benefits of using PM software are many. It allows the manager to keep responsible parties on task and on schedule by tracking their deadlines and milestones. Because it provides an