Project management is defined as the process of steering a project from the start through its lifecycle. It is the application of procedures, techniques, abilities, know-how, and experience to accomplish specific project goals in accordance with the project acceptance standards within predetermined bounds. Final deliverables in project management are subject to a limited amount of time and money. A project management life cycle begins with the project’s inception and ends when it is either finished or put to an end in some other way.
Every project is a short-term attempt to provide value by producing a distinct product, service, or outcome. Every project has a start and a finish. There is a team, a budget, a schedule, and a list of requirements that the team must adhere to. As opposed to ordinary operations, which are an organization’s continual activity, each project is distinct and comes to an end when the intended outcome is attained.
When do we use project management?
Projects are distinct from routine business operations and happen when an organization wants to deliver a solution to specific needs within a predetermined budget and time frame. Projects necessitate the temporary gathering of a team of individuals to concentrate on particular project goals. As a result, successful projects depend heavily on excellent teamwork. Project management is concerned with managing discrete packages of work to achieve specific objectives. The way the work is managed depends upon a wide variety of factors
The core components of project management.
- Identifying the need for a project.
- Gathering project requirements, establishing the deliverables’ quality, and predicting resources’ availability and timelines.
- Putting together a business case to support the investment.
- Obtaining funds and corporate agreement.
- Leading and motivating the project delivery team.
- Creating and carrying out a project management plan.
- Handling risks, problems, and changes on the project.
- Assessing progress in relation to the plan.
- Managing the project budget.
- Keeping in touch with stakeholders and the project team.
- Closing the project in a controlled fashion when appropriate.
The benefits of good project management.
According to a survey by the Project Management Institute, only 58 percent of firms recognize the true significance of project management and how it enables them to effectively address the problems they encounter. By using project management techniques, you can plan the course of your project from the beginning and know in advance where the deadlines and predicted costs will fall. This allows you to more effectively allocate your resources, preventing delays and project overruns.
- Improve internal communications.
Working together can be hard. With more efficient project management processes, you can reduce the complexity of collaboration, increase transparency, and ensure accountability, even when you’re working across teams or departments.
- Make better business decisions.
With clearer records of how your project is progressing, you get a deeper understanding of where your resources are being spent, what you need to prioritize and when, and if you’re at risk of going off track. Good project management means that you can forecast issues before they become issues, prevent bottlenecks, and make smarter, data-driven decisions.
- Iterate on your successes.
Project management helps you to scale high performance and build on your team’s best practices. By using the data and learnings from previous projects, you’re able to pinpoint where your team is excelling and where there’s room for improvement. And by measuring your KPIs you can create and track personalized benchmarks to understand how your team is performing project over project.
- Facilitates better risk management.
Risk management is the process of identifying, analyzing, and responding to threats that may affect the success of your project. Risk management isn’t reactive only; proper risk management is a critical component of the larger project management phase. By understanding the threats facing your project, you can plan in advance to mitigate damages while remaining on track with your larger goals. By thinking about what could possibly go wrong, you’ll be better prepared to respond to risk without derailing the entire project.
The five phases of project management.
The life cycle of a project has five stages.
Stage 1: Visualizing, selling, and initiating the project.
The project initiation phase marks the beginning of a project by determining high-level expectations, such as why a project is necessary, whether it is possible, and what is required to execute the project. Outputs of this phase include required stakeholder approvals to proceed to the next phase, documentation pertaining to project needs (business case), and rough estimates of time and resources required to complete the project (project charter), and an initial list of stakeholders.
Stage 2: Planning the project.
Once the project is approved to move forward based on your business case, statement of work, or project initiation document, you move into the planning phase. The planning phase can include the following steps:
- Deciding on milestones that lead up to goal completion.
- Developing a schedule for tasks and milestones, including time estimates and potential time buffers.
- Establishing change processes.
- Determining how and how often to communicate with team members and stakeholders.
- Creating and signing documents such as non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or requests for proposal (RFPs).
- Assessing and managing risk by creating a risk register.
- Holding a kick-off meeting to start the project.
Stage 3: Designing the processes and outputs (deliverables)
When the project is approved, the project team may proceed with the content design along with the persons or items needed to implement the project.
The design process includes defining:
- Measurements
- The monitoring method
- Status reporting protocols
- Evaluation criteria
- Design of the ultimate processes and outputs
- Implementation schedules
Stage 4: Monitoring and Control
The time, cost, and performance of the project are compared at every level of the project monitoring and controlling phase, and any necessary changes are made to the project activities, resources, and plan to keep things on track.
Project status reports and other communications that guarantee adherence to project goals, and prevent missing major milestones and deadlines are among the results of this phase.
Stage 5: Evaluating and closing out the project
In a project management life cycle, the process of wrapping up the project, assessing the project deliverables, and handing them off to the business leaders is referred to as the project closure phase. Time is available at this point for both celebration and reflection. This project management phase produces results that have been accepted for the project as well as lessons learned that may be used on future projects of a similar nature.
Usually evaluations are done to determine:
- Objectives met versus objectives planned.
- Actual tasks and events scheduled versus planned.
- Resources used versus planned resource usage.
- Costs versus budget.
- Organizational outcomes achieved versus planned outcomes; any unplanned outcomes.
- Effectiveness of project planning team .
- Effectiveness of implementation team.
- Team’s compilation of project documents, evaluations, and lessons learned.