What is Project Management

What is a Project Management? It's a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. A project is temporary in that it has a defined beginning and end in time, and therefore defined scope and resources. And a project is unique in that it is not a routine operation, but a specific set of operations designed to accomplish a singular goal. So a project team often includes people who don’t usually work together – sometimes from different organizations and across multiple geographies.

The development of software for an improved business process, the construction of a building or bridge, the relief effort after a natural disaster, the expansion of sales into a new geographic market — all are projects. And all must be expertly managed to deliver the on-time, on-budget results, learning and integration that organizations need.

Project management, then, is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements. It has always been practiced informally, but began to emerge as a distinct. Project management is the practice of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time. The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process.

The primary constraints are scope, time, quality and budget. The secondary—and more ambitious—challenge is to optimize the allocation of necessary inputs and apply them to meet pre-defined objectives. The objective of project management is to produce a complete project which complies with the client's objectives. In many cases the objective of project management is also to shape or reform the client's brief to feasibly address the client's objectives. Once the client's objectives are clearly established they should influence all decisions made by other people involved in the project – for example project managers, designers, contractors and sub-contractors. Ill-defined or too tightly prescribed project management objectives are detrimental to decision making.

The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast with businesses which are repetitive, permanent, or semi-permanent functional activities to produce products or services. In practice, the management of such distinct production approaches requires the development of distinct technical skills and management strategies. Project management methods can be applied to any project. It is often tailored to a specific type of projects based on project size, nature and industry. For example, the interior design industry, architecture/construction industry, which focuses on the delivery of things like buildings and roads etc., has developed its own specialized form of project management that it refers to as construction project management. For each type of project management, project managers develop and utilize repeatable templates that are specific to the industry they're dealing with. This allows project plans to become very thorough and highly repeatable, with the specific intent to increase quality, lower delivery costs, and lower time to deliver project results. So to be a project manager one needs to have expert level skills before foraying in project management course.

On Completion

One can work as planning executive, Team Manager-(facilitating commitment and productivity, removing obstacles, and motivating team members, aligning projects to business goals, managing stakeholders, and communicating project status, milestones, and unexpected difficulties effectively).

Course Highlights

PROJECT MANAGEMENT PROCESSES: (INITIATING, PLANNING, EXECUTING, MONITORING AND CONTROLLING, CLOSING), PROJECT MANAGEMENT KNOWLEDGE(INTEGRATION, SCOPE, TIME, COST, QUALITY, PROCUREMENT, HUMAN RESOURCES, COMMUNICATIONS, RISK MANAGEMENT, STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT), APPROACHES OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT- (BENEFITS REALIZATION MANAGEMENT, CRITICAL CHAIN PROJECT MANAGEMENT, EARNED VALUE MANAGEMENT, ITERATIVE AND INCREMENTAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT, LEAN PROJECT MANAGEMENT, PHASED APPROACH, PROCESS-BASED MANAGEMENT, PROJECT PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT, PRODUCT-BASED PLANNING ETC.