Project Management

Project Management



Project Management

PART 1

Project Management

Project Management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. It is often closely related to and sometimes conflated with program management.

What is Project Management?

There are a number of approaches to managing project activities including agile, interactive, incremental, and phased approaches. Regardless of the methodology employed, careful consideration must be given to the overall project objectives, timeline, and cost, as well as the roles and responsibilities of all participants and stakeholders.

A traditional phased approach identifies a sequence of steps to be completed. In the "traditional approach", we can distinguish 5 components of a project (4 stages plus control) in the development of a project:

Typical development phases of a project

Project initiation stage;

Project planning or design stage;

Project execution or production stage;

Project monitoring and controlling systems;

Project completion stage.

Not all the projects will visit every stage as projects can be terminated before they reach completion. Some projects do not follow a structured planning and/or monitoring stages. Some projects will go through steps 2, 3 and 4 multiple times.

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 (or Contract Documents), and Construction Administration. In software development, this approach is often known as the waterfall model, i.e., one series of tasks after another in linear sequence. 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. Waterfall development works well for small, well defined projects, but often fails in larger projects of undefined and ambiguous nature. The Cone of Uncertainty explains some of this as the planning made on the initial phase of the project suffers from a high degree of uncertainty. This becomes especially true as software development is often the realization of a new or novel product. In projects where requirements have not been finalized and can change, requirements management is used to develop an accurate and complete definition of the behavior of software that can serve as the basis for software development While the terms may differ from industry to industry, the actual stages typically follow common steps to problem solving — "defining the problem, weighing options, choosing a path, implementation and evaluation."

Rapid growth of new technologies and the proliferation of best practices have led to finance departments that operate with lean staffs. “Today there's little room in the average finance organization to take on additional workload unless the benefits associated with the effort are clear and the probability of achieving success is high”. (E. T. Bell, Essentials of Project Management 198)

“Yet PM and controllers know that both performance improvements and cost reductions depend on their ability to identify, justify, and manage discrete projects”. (Rob Doyle, “Positive Approach Towards Project Management”, Business Week June 1995)

Projects are the lifeblood of finance executive's improvement ...