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Welcome to the world of Project Management. The reason you are here shows that you are in search of information to broaden your knowledge around project management. The one best thing about this subject is that there is always something new to learn. Project Management is vast subject and every reader would look for a specific content to suit their learning needs. Historically, Project Management has been used in some shape or form since early civilization. The Project Management that we know about started somewhere in 1950s, where techniques such as CPM and PERT were invented and applied in manufacturing and defense sectors. Since then it has become popular and wide spread in construction industry, information technology, energy and more recently into banking, entertainment, product launches and event management.

Over the past few years, I have been trying to share my knowledge and perspective around this topic with readers like you, through various forums such as my blogs, replies to posts on sites, emails etc. While I feel satisfied, for the fact that I have been able to answer the queries of a wide spectrum of project management “Learners”. At the same time feel that there are a number of learners, who may not ask the question but would still seek to learn. There may be many learners who have not yet found the right answer to their question and those who feel that they would like to dig deeper into the detail. I am therefore planning to curate content for helping Students, who are looking at some real life perspective to broaden their understanding of the concepts. And for Front line practitioners, who wish to understand a particular aspect of the subject or simply keep up to date with knowledge.

I am planning to develop a short video series and a e-book to cover the topics around project management, over the coming months, which will be available to readers like you absolutely Free !!

In order to do this – I am reaching out to readers like you to seek some inputs that I could use to shape the content or any other suggestion that I should consider. I would also request you to share this link with the like minded learners in your networks.. Alternatively I could be reached by email or you could leave a comment below.

Project Management in Context

Project Management is the process by which projects are defined, planned, monitored, controlled and delivered.

Many methodologies are widely practiced in various organizations to deliver the project. From Traditional methods such as Waterfall, PERT & Critical Path Method (CPM) followed by Process Based Methodologies like LEAN, Six Sigma to more recent Agile methodology, all of these methodologies help the Project  Manager to deliver the Change in the most efficient and effective way.

Project Management Methodologies 

pic courtesy – medium.com

As per the Project Management Institute (PMI) the project management includes the following 5 stages, which are widely embraced by the project management community :

• Initiating -To identify and define the goal of the project
• Planning – To develop the roadmap for the project
• Executing – To build the deliverables.
• Controlling – To measure project performance in terms of Safety, Cost, Schedule, Quality
• Closing – Project is completed, handed over to operations and lessons learnt.

Project Lifecycle

Project Management process provides a single point of integrative responsibility i.e. the Project Manager. The Project Manager is the one who steers the Project team during the course of the project. However, the project management expertise is typically spread across the Project Team and delivery of the successful project can never be attributed to a single person but is always a team effort.

Essentially, through effective Project Management we would achieve the following :

• understand the need, problem or opportunity that the project will address.
• determine the success criteria and benefits of the proposed project.
• defining what will be delivered in terms of scope, cost, quality and schedule.
• planning and executing the deliverables.
• utilizing the resources in an efficient and optimum manner.
• delivering the benefit to the project sponsor.

A large project may be divided into sub projects with their own deliverables that will contribute to the overall project deliverable. Such projects are brought together under a programme and managed using programme management.

Portfolio of Projects

 

Project and Project Management defined

Project can be defined as a set of interrelated tasks, which is bound by scope, time & resources and is intended to achieve a goal / deliverable. Interrelated tasks, Scope, Time, Resource, and Cost Constraint to deliver the end goal are the characteristics of a project. Projects are different from routine operations and to understand this, let’s look at the case of operation of a large super market and consider the aspect of the supermarket business that we are all familiar with – the merchandise area. For running this area – new products need to be ordered and displayed, old products need to be removed and disposed, display area needs to be made attractive, items need to be coded for ease in billing etc. The different tasks are interrelated, they consume time, manpower, cost and are done to deliver a goal, which is to have good sales. Would this store operation be classed as a Project? The answer is NO. We would class this as a routine operation, for the reasons listed below in the table that summarizes the characteristics of a project, with an attempt to distinguish it from routine operations.

	Project	Routine Operation
Goal	To introduce change to increase revenue.	To optimize revenue by optimizing the existing processes.
Scope of work	Changes from stage to stage. Unique in every project, with uncertainty at every stage.	Standardized. Fixed routines. Limited uncertainty.
Resources	Vary in terms of numbers and competency depending on the activity being performed at a given stage during a project.	Steady resource requirement, with defined set of competencies.
Money	Normally funded in a phased and planned manner through capital funding.	Funded through yearly operational funding and remains more or less constant during the year.
Time	Mostly a constraint, which gets amplified due to the uncertain nature of project activities and most often has a negative impact on cost.	Fixed work schedules for fixed routines.
Nature of facilities	The infrastructure is temporary is only for lifetime of the project. Equipment, Manpower, facilities etc. are set up only for the duration of the project.	Requires permanent infrastructure that is required for the designed life of the facility.

 

Project management is an art of planning, scheduling, executing, monitoring and controlling the interrelated tasks in a project within the time, resource and cost constraints, in order to achieve a desired goal / outcome.

Effective Project Management the need of the hour

With the fast evolving technology, growing population and ever increasing needs, the future of the construction industry will definitely be a interesting and challenging one. Number of mega capital projects are kicked off every year across the globe, which offer huge opportunities for development at the same time can pose enormous risks in terms of meeting the project objectives of time, cost, quality and in some cases risks to environment and the community.  The bulk of these Mega projects are in remote and challenging locations which may pose additional challenges in terms of logistics, political risks etc. Experience has also shown that the Construction industry is critically short of competent Project Managers, Project Engineers, Design Engineers, Competent construction workforce to name a few.  Effective project management, right from the moment the project idea is conceived is therefore the need of the hour. A number of case studies on projects are available from which we can learn the secrets of success and the pitfalls of failure.  This blog post aims at outlining some of the basics of Project management.  My aim is to drive the content based on the feedback received from you. I hope you find this blog interesting !!

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