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Project Management
Project Management Defined
Project management is the discipline of organizing and managing resources in such a way
that these resources deliver all the work required to complete a project within defined
scope, time, and cost constraints (Berry 2006). Almost any human activity that involves
carrying out a non-repetitive task can be a project. But there is a big difference between
carrying out a very simple project involving one or two people and one involving a
complex mix of people, organizations and tasks.
The art of planning for the future has always been a human trait (Berkun 2005). In essence
a project can be captured on paper with a few simple elements: a start date, an end date,
the tasks that have to be carried out and when they should be finished, and some idea of
the resources that will be needed during the course of the project. When the plan starts to
involve different things happening at different times, some of which are dependent on each
other, plus resources required at different times and in different quantities and perhaps
working at different rates, the paper plan could start to cover a vast area and be unreadable.
This was a problem facing the US Navy in the development of the Polaris missile system.
There were so many aspects to the project that a new technique had to be invented to cope
with it, the PERT technique (Lewis 2002). This and later developments led to
mathematical techniques that can be used to find the critical path through a series of
planned tasks that interconnect during the life of a project. You could begin the story of
modern project management from this time. But that would be unfair as project
management is not only about planning but also about human attributes like leadership and
motivation. The idea that complex plans could be analyzed by a computer to allow
someone to control a project is the basis of much of the development in technology that
now allows projects of any size and complexity not only to be planned but also modeled to
answer what if? questions (Foster 1999).
Development of Project Management
The original programs and computers tended to produce answers long after an event had
taken place. Now, there are many project planning and scheduling programs that can
provide real time information, as well as linking to risk analysis, time recording, costing,
estimating and other aspects of project control (Kerzner 2003). But computer programs are
not project management: they are tools for project managers to use. Project management is
all that mix of components of control, leadership, teamwork, and resource management
that goes into a successful project.
Project managers can be found in all industries. Their numbers have grown rapidly as
industry and commerce has realized that much of what it does is project work. And as
project-based organizations have started to emerge, project management is becoming
established as both a professional career path and a way of controlling business. So
opportunities in project management now exist not only in being a project manager, but
also as part of the support team in a project or programmer office or as a team leader for
part of a project (Foster 1999). There are also qualifications that can be attained through
the professional associations.
One reason for the rapid growth is the need to understand how to look after complex
projects, often in high tech areas, which are critical to business success but also have to use
scarce resources efficiently. Most people still want their projects to be on time, meet
quality objectives, and not cost more than the budget. These form the classic time, quality,
cost triangle (Kerzner 2003). In fact if you have an unlimited budget and unlimited time,
project management becomes rather easy. For most people, however, time and money are
critical and that is what makes project management so important today.
Project Specifications
A specification is the definition of your project: a statement of the problem, not the
solution (Kerzner 2003). Normally, the specification contains errors, ambiguities, and
misunderstandings. Thus before embarking upon the next six months of activity working
on the wrong project, reading, revising and ensuring that everyone concerned with the
project is working with the same understanding. The outcome of this problem should be a
written definition of what is required, by when; and this must be agreed by all involved.
There are no short-cuts to this, if this time is not spent initially, it will cost far more later
on (Kerzner 2003).
The agreement upon a written specification has several benefits: the clarity will reveal
misunderstandings, the completeness will remove contradictory assumptions, the analysis
will show technical and practical details which are normally overlooked, and the
agreement forces all concerned to actually read and think about the details. The work on
the specification can seen as the first stage of Quality Assurance since you are looking for
and countering problems in the very foundation of the project (Kerzner 2003). From this
perspective the creation of the specification clearly merits a large investment of time. Once
the project is underway, changes cost time and money.
The places to look for errors in a specification are in the global context (Lewis 2002 .
People often focus too narrowly on the work of one team and fail to consider how it fits
into the larger picture. Some of the work may actually be undone or duplicated by others.
Some of the proposed work may be incompatible with that of others. Between the team
