Why Project Management?

Have you noticed how everyone is getting busier and busier? Every year seems shorter than the last, days are packed with activities and tasks to the brim, and then the stress hits...

If I could show you how to start winning in both your personal life and profession in just a few simple steps (that you can learn in 5 minutes), would you please not buy the product I’m not selling?

My aim is to help - you - today!

Management is not a profession but a skill. If you breathe, you are human and have to complete anything by a certain time, you are already doing management.

This piece will simply learn you to do it much much faster and better.

There are roughly 20 distinctly definable management specialties or types in use today. (Change Management, Design Management, Engineering Management, Facility Management, Financial and Accounting Management, Human Resources Management, Information Technology Management, Innovation Management, Knowledge Management, Marketing Management, Operations Management, Procurement Management, Portfolio Management, Project Management, Public Relations, Quality Management, Research and Development Management, Risk Management, Sales Management, Strategic Management, and Supply Chain Management)

As an individual, you will perform each of these at some point in your life. Some of them you will find pleasurable, and others not so much. If you reflect, you can probably recognize some of these already when you consider both your personal and professional life.

There are three main ways in which you manage almost everything in your life - operational management e.g. paying your bills every month (where the same process/pattern is repeated on a regular basis), project management e.g. planning and taking a vacation (where something new or different is added to your life) and then there is crisis management e.g. vehicle accident (the place where you manage unplanned events that “surprise” you.).

Project Management is used to build your ability to do both operational management and crises management!!!

If you can learn to do project management really well, then the other two will improve drastically as a result.

What is a project?
a) Temporary
b) Unique Product, Service, or Result
c) Beginning and End
d) Clear Objectives
e) Defined team

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT PROJECT MANAGEMENT!!!

All the tools, techniques, documents, methods, templates, articles and every piece of information that you can find is designed to do 1 (ONE) thing.

Achieve the objective!

For the last 100 years or so, this management discipline has focused on eliminating everything that does not contribute to achieving this one thing. It is the leanest, meanest, most efficient and effective way to manage on this planet.

How does it work?

1. Identify outputs, requirements, objectives, needs, wants, and like to have’srn a) Client - Person(s) who will pay for the effort
b) Consumer - Person(s) benefiting or using the intended result
c) Project Team - Person(s) doing the work to obtain the result
d)Affected People - Everybody that would be “touched” by the project and/or result

2. Find a balance
a) Scope - How big, how many, where?
b) Quality - How long should the result last?
c) Schedule - How much time does the project have to deliver?
d) Resources - Access to Money, People, Ground, Steel, IT?
e) Risk - What can cause the project or the result to fail?

3. Get approval - From the people in 1

4. Formal Project Phases
a) Initiate - get everything required together to start the work
b) Plan - detail exploration of how each element that contributes to result will be built
c) Execute the plan - apply the resources as planned to reach the mini-results that add up to the big result
d) Monitor progress & control deviance - it’s a plan, not a law written in stone, things change, you discover and learn and you adapt to this knowledge.
e) Close - when resources become depleted, when results appear, when the big result is delivered, just stop, learn, measure, compare, make sure.

That’s not so difficult. If you really think about it, you have done all of this before.

What does makes project management magic is the sequence of events and the focus on what each of the steps has to produce.

Only one rule!!! Noting but the absolute minimum has to be done to achieve the result. Every extra little bell and whistle will cost someone money, delay some result, waste someone’s time and frankly not add to the desired or perceived result.

Also published at - https://futuretrustholdings.wordpress.com/2019/03/01/why-project-management/