What is Project Management? Objectives, Methodologies

Before we learn Project Management, let's understand:

What is Project?

A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. A project is defined as temporary because it has a defined beginning and end time, and it is unique because it has a particular set of operations designed to accomplish a goal

The primary characteristics of a project are

• It has a definite start and end point
• Once the end point is reached, the project is over
• It is attempting to achieve something new
• Project must meet the customer or stakeholder requirements

What is Project Management?

The project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, motivating and controlling resources to achieve specific goals. The main challenge of project management is to achieve project goals and objectives while keeping in mind the project scope, time, quality and cost.

Project management actually began in the early 1950s. The need for project management arised observing the benefit of organizing work within the project and critical need to co-ordinate across different departments and professionals.

Project management mainly deals with these ten areas

• Integration
• Cost
• Human resources
• Stakeholder management
• Scope
• Quality
• Communications
• Time
• Procurement
• Risk Management

Project Management Objectives

While preparing project, look project into these three perspectives, it helps to give much better understanding of the whole process

• How does project fit into the organization?
• How the project will evolve over time?
• What skills are required to manage the project successfully?

Project Management Methodologies

There are various methodologies that are available for project management.

1. Prince2
2. Agile
3. Six Sigma
4. Scrum
5. Kanban
6. Lean
7. Waterfall

We will look each of this into in a later part of the tutorial. Various tools are available to track project tasks and measure accomplishments during the project. These includes Gantt charts, PERT charts and Work down structures.

Summary

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, motivating and controlling resources to achieve specific goals.

• Project management deals with various aspect of projects like
  • Cost
  • Human resources
  • Stakeholder management
  • Scope
  • Quality
  • Communications
  • Time
  • Procurement, etc.
• Various tools used to track project tasks and measure accomplishments during the project includes Gantt charts, PERT charts, etc.
• There are various methodologies that are available for project management like Prince2, Agile, Six Sigma, etc.