PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Project Management Approaches

Project Management Approaches

Introduction

The word 'project' has been taken from the word of Latin origin, which is meant 'to combine and hybrid'. Project management can be defined as a planned effort to accomplish a certain project. It includes planning, organizing and managing resources which leads to success in achieving the project. Project management includes the planning a project, identifying tasks and goals which are to be achieved. A well executed project leads to the success of the business. This paper attempts to discuss the traditional and agile project management approaches. Further, it explains their advantages and disadvantages and compares the elements of each respectively.

Discussion

Traditional Project Management Approaches

Traditionally, project management methodologies such as PMBOK and PRINCE2 have had a strong predictive guidance. That is, from the product detail you want to develop (functional analysis / technical, functional requirements / technical, etc.) Are defined phases / activities planned well in time based on available resources. From this initial projection, the target during the course of the project is to achieve compliance with what is planned: timing, cost and quality (Cleland, D. & Gareis, R. 2006).

In traditional approach, we can list down 5 components of a project in the development of a project (Pinto, J. K. and Slevin, 1988):

1. Project initiation

2. Project planning

3. Production or execution project

4. Project supervisor or commander

5. Project completion Not all projects will visit every stage as projects can be completed before they reach completion. Depending upon the criteria, some of the projects may not have the phase of the planning or monitoring, while some projects may directly jump to the steps 2 and then follow the further step, or it may even repeat the steps if necessary or required by the project.

In a traditional four phased approach Project Management, following are the main elements that are followed (Kreiner, 1995);

Time - the amount of time required to complete the project. It is broken down for analytical purposes in time required to complete the project.

Cost - It is calculated from the variable of time, which is mentioned above. However, the cost of developing an internal project is time multiplied by the cost of team members involved. Quality - the amount of time put into individual tasks determines the overall quality of the project. Some tasks may require a specified amount of time to perform adequately, but given more time could be completed exceptionally. Over the course of a large project, quality can have a significant impact on time and cost (or vice versa). Scope - conditions defined for the end result. This is the overall definition of what the project is supposed to accomplish, and a specific description of what the end result should be or accomplish.

This type of approach has proved useful, improving quality and reducing the deviations in the projects is implemented. However, they may present certain disadvantages:

The project manager may not have expertise and devote themselves solely to control the established procedures and was limited to the generation of ...