The Need for Project Management

The Need for Project Management

The Need for Project Management

Before I talk about what is Project Management, consider what happened with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) back in January 2007. The undertaking was to implement a new payroll system that would be better than the one it was replacing. Not really taking it as a project resulted in poor management of the whole initiative. Hey if it's not a project with a Project Manager assigned to it then whose job is it? Who is responsible for the success or failure of the whole undertaking? There are a lack of training. Oops, if you don't train your users then even the best product in the world is a failure because it won't work itself. The result for LAUSD? The whole thing was a grand failure. Some teachers got paid as much as $10,000 for month's work while some got as little as 20 cents. Some employees were forced to take bank loans to meet their planned expenses.

Surprising as it may sound that something as important as payroll was not taken as seriously as it should have been, this is not something unique and there have been other failures on a far larger scale that could have been avoided by simply performing some basic tasks diligently. There is an unfulfilled need for Project Management in a lot of the work that we do today. However we are so busy and caught up in the grind that sometimes it's not easy to see if something deserves to be taken on as a project or just another task the boss wants done.

Part of the reason is companies not having their own project methodologies. As a result they don't encourage work to be taken up as projects. Employees wanting to do so quickly find themselves lacking in support from above and lacking in resources as well.

So really there isn't just a need for Project Management but also a need for bringing Project Management awareness among those who are either caught up in the daily grind or are too respectful of a status quo that does too little for their cause. At the very least, look at any work that you might be asked to do that is outside the scope of what of usually do. You should almost certainly be doing that as a project. Whether you treat it as a mini-project or a full-fledged project will determine on the nature of the task you find yourself having to do. Not treating an out of the ordinary task as a project is a recipe for disaster. As you progress in your career the frequency of such tasks will continue to increase and the stakes will become higher. This means failure will be even more spectacular but success all the more impressive. If these tasks are treated with as much attention as we give to the tasks we do day in and day out then that is insufficient. Bigger the task, bigger the risk of failure. Do you see the need for Project Management?

Is there a need for Project Management in the work you do? Put down a comment or two and share it with the rest of us. Head over to my Project Management website if you need to learn how to get a better understanding of what is Project Management.

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