The situation
Project management is the
discipline of planning,
organizing and managing resources to
bring about the successful
completion of specific project goals
and objectives.
Because Projects differ from the
ongoing operations of a firm,
managing them presents a challenge
of its own.
A
project is a finite endeavour
(having specific start and
completion dates) undertaken to
create a unique product or service
which brings about beneficial change
or added value.
This finite
characteristic of projects stands in
sharp contrast to
processes, or operations, which
are permanent or semi-permanent
functional work to repetitively
produce the same product or service.
In practice, the management
of these two systems
is often found to be quite
different, and as such requires the
development of distinct technical
skills and the adoption of separate
management.
The primary challenge of
project management is to achieve all
of the project goals and objectives
while honoring the project
constraints. Typical constraints are scope
,time and budget.
The secondary—and more
ambitious—challenge is to optimize the allocation
and integration of
inputs necessary to meet pre-defined
objectives
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Project management as
discipline
While
Projects are definitely unique, the
overall process of managing Projects
can be defined as a discipline with
proven and distinct rules and
approaches.
Project
management process covers all phases of a
project:
- Pre-acquisition / project identification
- Acquisition & Profiling
- Project definition (
Stakeholder and ground rule
definition)
- Planning (Risk management,
Work breakdown structures,
Scheduling, Cost estimations,
Resource balancing)
- Project execution and
controlling (Communication,
Progress measuring, Corrective
measures)
- Project Handover and
closeout (Testing,
Commissioning, handover,
operational phase preparation)
- Project Review
All steps are essential, but to what degree they need to
be employed depends very much on the nature of the project.
Conclusion
Understanding
the project lifecycle of given
project types is essential to
customize the project management
process for your particular
business. And as individual as
projects are, as individual are
companies environments.
Finding the
right balance and selecting the
right focus points supporting what
your business needs most, is
essential to deploy the given
resources to areas which strengthens
your business.
Finding this
balance is definitely not an easy
task and needs a pragmatic analysis
and proper insight in the
operational dependencies in order to
select the right management tools
for your projects.
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