PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Project Management

Project Management

Introduction

Project management is the discipline of organizing and managing resources in such a way that the project is completed within defined scope, quality, time and cost constraints. A project is a temporary and one-time endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service, which brings about beneficial change or added value. This property of being a temporary and one-time undertaking contrasts with processes, or operations, which are permanent or semi-permanent ongoing functional work to create the same product or service over and over again. The management of these two systems is often very different and requires varying technical skills and philosophy, hence requiring the development of project managements.

Discussion

To understand the strategies, tools and techniques for project management as it applies to IS projects you will need to understand what causes a project to succeed or fail.

From the project management perspective, a project is considered a success if: The resulting information system is acceptable to the customer. The system is delivered on time, the system is delivered within budget and the systems development process had a minimal impact on ongoing business operations. Some typical project mismanagement problems are, taking shortcuts through or around the system development methodology, a lake of organization's commitment to the system development methodology and insufficient resources. With each problem there are consequences for the project.

The project gets behind schedule, and the team wants to catch up. The project becomes over budget, and the team wants to make up costs by skipping steps. The team is not trained or skilled in some of the methodology's activities and requirements so they are skipped. Ultimately, the major cause of project failure is that most project managers were not educated or trained to be project managers. The true project manager possesses a body of knowledge that deserves explaining.

The good project managers possess a core set of competencies in his body of knowledge. Here are two basic premises of project management competencies: first, they cannot manage a process the individual have never used. Second, managers must have an understanding of the business and culture that provides a context for the project. On the other hand, the project manager possesses functions that include scoping, planning, staffing, organizing, scheduling, directing, controlling, and closing to insure that a project is completed.

These functions are dependent on ongoing interpersonal communication among project managers, teams, and other managers.

Some project managers use tools and techniques to support their management of a project. This PMBOK include tools such as the Project Evaluation and Review Technique (or PERT), chart and the Gantt chart, The PERT chart is a graphical network model which depicts a project's task and the relationships between those tasks. Whereas a Gantt chart is a simple horizontal bar chart that depicts project tasks against a calendar.

The project manager can use these charts to his advantage with the Gantt being more effective when you are seeking to communicate schedule. The PERT charts are more effective when the project manager wants to study the relationships ...