Project management is a business field with elements of both art and science. It has been defined by any number of writers as “the application of knowledge and technique to the achievement of projects”. And yet, for large companies, project management has come to have a second rank for science in its management against literature, a science known as fields such as; economics. This is not so surprising if you are looking at their application. The tasks they perform have never been committed to a science. As on a prince2 Foundation London certification.
The first thing project leaders do is to create a project team of consensus, and choose from the project team with a diverse amount of strengths and weaknesses. The team is focused on their project deliverables and will have a clear understanding of the critical success factors.
Team members will have a clear understanding of their roles within their scope but it is important to recognize their own limitations. In order for the project to be successful, members will have to develop a keen understanding of their performance relative to the needs of the project as a whole, as well as in a relative comparison with what the organization requires in terms of work performance.
The plan is generally a separate document, referred to by the team as a critical path, the critical path will show how the team will work to achieve the project plan. It will feature a series of critical steps leading up to the accomplished milestone date and should be reviewed at defined times in order to ensure this plan is achieving the goal.
As you can see, Project management has a factual counterpart. It contains information of both sorts. In terms of numbers and dollars you can see the formulas are pretty close.
Like the science of management, project management has a specific field of knowledge as a science of art. The challenge is controlling the elements of project management. One of the key advantages that you have as the project leader is that you are in a greater position to control those elements. Whereas project management is part of the way the firm works, project management can be on a par with any field in a business. There are a number of key element that comprise project management.
Some of the key elements are project planning and control, scheduled and controlled execution, staffing, open incident management, and monitoring of the critical path.
The biggest challenge is to manage all of this. The challenge starts many times before the project begins. You define the goal and then specify the requirements your team must satisfy. The team will fill any gaps in the project plan to best meet the need. The actual planning aspect of project management is broad based and must be recognized as being based on a process. You need to be as specific in planning as you are in making your project schedules. Schedule the important things to time for review and do not hold items hostage. Use a clear schedule that makes it easy to review and play to your strengths. Specific dates must reflect the changed requirements of a compelling interest. It is best that all resources have the opportunity for a review to identify their priorities. The key is not to simply tell the team “Cut the 120 to 90 and put the 144 in.” You must reiterate the meager correspondence down to a number and restate your caution in movements to increase effective execution. With the plan in place, you must set up periodic reviews that re-assure your team of the fact that they are working to these standards. You will also assure them of a specific evaluation date at each stage of the project. It is the task of the project manager to skip stakeholder meetings and keep the team on track toward the goal.
Project management is a process by which standards help a team of people meet a common goal. Sometimes this goal is set for your customers and other times it is for your team to reach or exceed a desired project goal. Some believe that project management leads to the Team cheaply that strives to achieve the project goal, and woodlands do have a lengthy list of indicators that a team is on track, but that usually what the reports will show is that new team members are attempting to show their abilities to fit in, thus your newest team member in this case is merely proving to the rest of their team that he or she is an effective. We call it “the peer comparison process”.
The important thing to remember is not why you must measure it, but how exactly is it being measured as there can be a variety of ways to measure success and if you are measuring by the quantity of task accomplishment, you will find that they are being measured by flawed standards in which data are inadvertently omitted or misunderstood.
Though your project’s goal is a common goal that is adopted by leaders in virtually all businesses, this standard is too broad and not with the team’s needs in mind.