por What is project management?
The project management It is the management of resources to comply with the planning, execution, control and achievement of one or more objectives in a determined time, within a company.
A project is transitory work designed to produce a unique product, service, or result, with a defined beginning and end, that is undertaken to achieve notable goals and objectives, to achieve added value, or beneficial change.
The temporary quality of projects is different from routine business operations, which are simple iterative, semi-permanent or permanent activities to produce services or products.
Project management optimizes time, money and performance.
Project Management Phases
Start
The initiation phase determines the nature and scope of the project. You need to understand the business environment and also ensure that the necessary controls are built into the project, to know its feasibility. In this phase, a policy can be created that outlines what the project is about, its scope, how the work will be done, the business needs, and the necessary costs, tasks, and schedules.
Planning
The main objective is to appropriately plan the time, costs and resources to calculate the necessary work and effectively manage the risk during the execution of the project. It consists of determining the methodology to follow.
Identify deliverables and create work breakdown structures.
Identify the activities necessary to complete those deliverables and connect those activities with a logical sequence.
Calculate the resource requirement for the activities.
Calculate the time and cost of the activities.
Development of the schedule and budget.
Risk planning.
Get formal approval to start work.
Execution
During the execution, it must be known what are the planned deadlines that must be executed. The execution phase ensures that the deliverables of the project management plan are done in the agreed time.
This phase involves proper allocation, coordination, and management of human resources and any other resources, such as materials and budgets. The result of this phase are the deliverables of the project.
project documentation
To maintain budget, scope, efficiency, and also pace, a project must have physical documents (reports) related to each specific task.
With the correct documentation, it is easy to see whether or not the requirements of a project are met. The documentation provides information about what has already been completed for that project.
Done correctly, documentation can be the backbone of a project’s success.
monitoring and control
It consists of the processes that are carried out to observe the execution of the project, so that potential problems can be identified in a timely manner and corrective measures can be taken, when necessary, to control the execution of the project.
Project performance is observed and measured to identify variances in the management plan. It also provides feedback between the different phases of the project, in order to implement preventive or corrective actions to comply with the project management plan.
Closing
It contains the formal completion of the project and its acceptance. Administrative activities include reporting lessons learned. It consists of finalizing all the activities of the entire set of processes to formally close the project.
Post-implementation review is also included in this phase. This is a vital phase for the project team to learn from the experiences and apply it to future projects.
The things that worked well in the project should be observed and the things that did not work analyzed, to generate learning.
Project Management Goals
The objective of project management is to carry out a complete project that satisfies the client’s requirements.
Successfully develop the phases of the project
A project, regardless of its size, usually involves five distinctive phases of equal importance: Initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and control, closure.
Smooth and non-disruptive development and execution of all previous phases guarantee the success of a project.
communicate efficiently
It should always be kept in mind that the success or failure of a project depends to a great extent on teamwork. Therefore, the key to success lies in collaboration.
To this end, establishing good communication is of great importance. On the one hand, the information must be articulated in a clear and complete way, so that everyone fully understands it. On the other hand, you must have the ability to listen and receive constructive feedback.
Achieve the main objective of the project
The main objective of the project must be completed within the calculated time, with the expected quality and within the considered budget.
Optimizing the necessary inputs assigned and their application to meet the predefined objectives of the project is a matter where there is always room for improvement.
All processes and procedures can be reformed and updated to improve the sustainability of a project and also to lead the team through the process of strategic change.
Produce a project that follows the client’s objectives
This could mean that you need to attend to and reform the client’s vision, or negotiate with the client regarding the objectives of the project, to turn them into feasible goals.
Meeting client expectations and keeping them happy not only leads to a successful collaboration, which can help eliminate surprises during project execution, but also ensures sustainability well into the future.
Advantages of Project Management
The main advantage of project management is that it helps to manage projects effectively. This allows for faster troubleshooting.
Greater efficiency in the provision of services. Project management provides an easily followed roadmap leading to project completion.
Greater customer satisfaction, as the project is completed on time, optimizing resources.
Greater effectiveness in the provision of services, since with each finished project more experience is obtained for the next ones.
Enhances growth and development within the team.
Greater flexibility to manage resources.
Increased risk assessment.
Project Management Examples
American Airlines
The merger of American Airlines with US Airways created an overlap in technology and programs. They knew that spreadsheets were not enough to manage complex resources and projects.
To gain visibility into broader divisional and global priorities, they began using project management for staffing, resource management, and capacity planning.
As a result, the airline went from capitalizing its work in information technology from 10% to 20%. This equates to a multi-million dollar net positive impact on your balance sheet.
Now, they have access to more reliable and better data to make critical decisions about projects and resources.
Royal Bank
The Royal Bank of Scotland needed to implement consistent and reliable data to inform financial and resource decisions. Therefore, they chose project management to drive this consistency. So they retired 35 legacy systems, more than 50 user-developed tools, and hundreds of spreadsheets.
With data in different formats and hundreds of projects managed by different systems, they wanted to control their data to see their total customer base more clearly.
In twelve months they were able to fulfill their business case and achieve a return on investment. Along the way, they have improved transparency and reduced costs in each business unit.
References
Project management. Retrieved from en.wikipedia.org.
What is Project Management? Retrieved from pmi.org.
What Are the Objectives of Project Management? Recovered from clarizen.com.