subject: What is Project Management? [print this page] What is Project Management? What is Project Management?
Project Management
Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, securing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives.
A project has a defined beginning and end, undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, to bring about beneficial change or added value. The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast to business as usual, which are repetitive, permanent or semi-permanent functional work to produce products or services.
The management of these two systems requires the development of distinct technical skills and the adoption of separate management.
The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honouring the preconceived project constraints. Typical constraints are scope, time, and budget.
The secondary challenge is to optimize the allocation and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives.
The traditional approach:
A traditional phased approach identifies a sequence of steps to be completed. In the "traditional approach", we can distinguish 5 components of a project:
Initiation ---> Planning and Design
---> Executing Monitoring and Controlling ---> Closing
Many industries use variations on these project stages.
For example, when working on a brick and mortar design and construction, projects will typically progress through stages like Pre-Planning, Conceptual Design, Schematic Design, Design Development, Construction Drawings, and Construction Administration.
In software development many organizations have adapted the Rational Unified Process (RUP) to fit this methodology, although RUP does not require or explicitly recommend this practice.
Critical Chain Project Management:
Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) is a method of planning and managing projects that puts more emphasis on the resources needed in order to execute project tasks.
The most complex part involves engineering professionals of different fields (Civil, Electrical, Mechanical ...) working together.
It is an application of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) to projects. The goal is to increase the completion rates of projects in an organization.
Applying the first three of the five focusing steps of TOC, the system constraint for all projects is identified as are the resources. To exploit the constraint, tasks on the critical chain are given priority over all other activities. Finally, projects are planned and managed to ensure that the resources are ready when the critical chain tasks must start, subordinating all other resources to the critical chain.
