What is project management?

Project management is a set of best practices achieving the main objectives and indirect finite time. It includes, among others, planning, scheduling, implementation, control, and settlement of tasks that make up the implementation of project objectives. Proper project management determines the success of a project.

This article covers:

Some reasons for the importance of project management:

Make goals focused and clear.

Project management ensures that there is careful planning to achieve specific goals. Without clear goals, team members will lose focus, have no clear objective picture, and don’t know what to do and why.

This can be interrupted by breaking the project into tasks. By dividing the tasks, team members can achieve these goals to achieve a bigger main goal.

Create mutually agreed and realistic schedules and plans

Creating a schedule helps avoid unmanaged or late projects and planning to do for everyone involved in the project.

Project management is also important for setting appropriate expectations about what to achieve, when, and how much. Without paying attention to planning, budget estimation, and time, the project will be too ambitious and cause it to be late and over budget.

Maximizing existing resources

Project management can track project and project risk management, thereby ensuring all resources are used effectively and efficiently.

Quality control project management helps identify, manage and maintain quality. With a clear process, the team can assess the output quality at each stage of the project. Good quality will make clients satisfied.

Risk management

Project management is important to ensure project risks can be managed and mitigated properly to avoid future problems. The project manager must analyze all potential project risks, make mitigation, and plan if these risks occur in the future. These risks must be structured based on the likelihood of occurrence (probability) and the amount of risk. By making risk management, projects can more easily adapt to changes that occur.

Creating the right plan

Project management leads to proper planning and covers the entire process from start to finish by maximizing quality and capability.

Project management ensures the exact people do the exact jobs at the right time. Clear planning and processes help identify each team member’s role, streamline operations and inputs, anticipate risks, and create checks and balances to ensure projects align with the strategies that have been developed.

Help learn from success and failure.

Sometimes the project goes smoothly, but sometimes the project can fail. However, we can learn from experiences, and mistakes can be avoided at a later date. Project management ensures this learning is applied by taking a retrospective to see what worked and what did not and changes to be made for future projects. 

What Are the Stages of Project Management?

The project control process has several stages. Anything? 

  • Project definition is an initial process that aims to analyze what factors will influence success and failure. 
  • Project initialization, a stage that focuses on planning resources before they are carried out. 
  • Project planning, the process of describing how the project is done based on time, budget, and scope. 
  • Project implementation, project work according to customer wishes, and predefined procedures.
  • Project monitoring and control, supervising to control the project so that the entire process runs smoothly and on target. 
  • Closing the project, receiving the final result of the project, and stopping all resources. 

Key points for successful project management

Here are some key points for successful project management:

  • If the project goals (purposes and goals) are not shared between the project manager and members; it won’t be easy to reach the goals because the vectors will not point in the same direction.

Information sharing requires visualization of information and close communication between project managers and members, and members. Document management is essential for sharing information in projects involving numerous members.

  • A project with precise tasks and responsibilities for each member is a collaboration with multiple members. By clarifying the tasks, obligations, and schedules of each member, the project will proceed smoothly. Task management is important for that purpose.
  • Choosing the right method or tool for your project. The project management tool or project management method depends on the project’s content and purpose. You must select and use the appropriate tools and techniques.
  • A project in which the project manager is conscious of raising the sense of responsibility of the members will not succeed unless they fulfill the prescribed responsibility in work for a limited time. Therefore, the project manager needs to manage the members to perform the tasks responsibly and be conscious of increasing the members’ sense of responsibility.
  • Tight risk management and early risk awareness. Most projects do not go as planned. It is important to anticipate risks in advance and to be able to grasp the signs of risk as soon as possible.
  • Cost control is possible. It is necessary to control costs so as not to exceed the budget as much as possible.

Advantages of project management

There are many advantages of using project management properly. Below is a perfect example.

  • With task management, you can instantly know who is doing what. By visualizing members with a large amount of work and members with a small amount of work, the burden can be made as equal as possible.
  • Data processing can be automated by using tools that have analysis and aggregation functions.
  • Communication becomes smooth by using the file-sharing function and the bulletin board function.

Project management points that fail

The project plan is ambiguous, there are few management items, and it is inadequate. 

The project is not well planned, and the project with many ambiguous parts will not succeed. In a project, it is necessary to consider each element, such as task identification, scheduling, cost estimation, etc., and formulate a solid plan.

Lack of communication

If there is a lack of communication between the project manager, members, and members, the progress and troubles will not be known, and the schedule will be delayed.

Poor task management

Even if communication is lacking, if task management is well done, delays and troubles can be detected early and can be managed before they become major problems. If the task is not managed, the project cannot succeed.

Poor document management

In general, projects often change specifications and task schedules. If you don’t have a document that gives you an idea of ​​the entire project, you won’t get the information you need, and you’ll make the wrong decisions when performing tasks, leading to project failures.

Example of Project Management

There are lots of examples. Some of them are as follows.

Construction Project

Construction projects are projects related to the construction of public facilities, such as constructing dams, buildings, power plant areas, bridges, factories, highways, toll roads, and so on.

Research Project

A research project is a project carried out for research and development purposes. These studies’ results are later used to improve the quality of goods or services, or only for the project’s development.

Capital Intensive Projects

Capital-intensive projects are large production projects with the help of mechanics (robots). This project is called “solid” because the execution requires a lot of capital. The amount of capital needed makes it only possible for large companies.

Manufacturing Projects

A manufacturing project is a project that carries out a design to produce a product as a whole.

What Is a Project Manager?

A project manager is a position that manages the progress of the entire project and has full responsibility for the budget, quality, delivery time, and quality of deliverables. His job is to look at the whole project, make decisions, and make the project a success.

Ten most important features of the project manager

Any project management expert must have thorough knowledge as well as the ability to self-organize. The ability to rationally assess the risk posed by a project is a basic condition of a good project manager.

To complete its tasks, the project manager must have practical communication skills with his collaborators. Human resources management is an important premise for the selected team to be efficient.

Characteristics of a successful project manager:

  • Original ideas,
  • Good communication skills,
  • Integrity,
  • Enthusiasm,
  • Empathy for team members,
  • Expertise,
  • Ability to set priorities,
  • Do well under pressure,
  • Team orientation,
  • Ability to solve the issues quickly and effectively.

What is the job of a project manager?

The work of a project manager is diverse but can be broadly classified into the following five categories.

1. Formulation of a project development plan

He will listen to customer requests and decide what kind of project to develop. In addition to deciding the structure and main functions of the project, he will also decide the scale, budget, and schedule, and clarify the required personnel and man-hours.

2. Organization of project team

He will gather the necessary human resources, form a project team, and prepare the system development environment.

3. Project promotion and management

Explain the purpose, schedule, delivery date, etc., of system development to team members and share it with the entire team. He will keep you informed of customer requests, decisions, changes, etc., check each section’s progress, and manage the project to proceed as planned.

If anything goes in the wrong direction, he will negotiate with the customer to adjust the schedule.

4. Support for facilitating interpersonal relationships within the team

In addition to acting as a coordinator between the customer and the development team, it helps the progress of the project by collaborating with other departments and sharing information to solve problems within the team.

5. Ratings and reviews

After the project is over, he will look back and verify any problems or improvements. Moreover, he is also responsible for budgeting and scheduling decisions. 

What is a project charter?

The project charter is a formal written statement and supporting documentation that proves the existence of the project. The senior management signifies the project’s scope, such as quality, time, cost, and deliverable constraints, and enables the project manager to allocate organizational resources for project work. It is usually the first official document after the start of the project.

Purpose of the Project Charter

The project charter defines the exact purpose of the project. The purpose of the project “Why do I have started this project” is information that. The clearer this purpose, the clearer the criteria for success, and the easier it is to share with the project team.

This project’s purpose is based on the requirements we will see later and declares what measures will be taken against the organization’s needs.

What you should be aware of here is the project’s purpose alone, the organization’s strategy, and what this project means in it. Clarifying “why” to start a project and “what” to do is the project charter’s primary role.

What is the specific content of the project charter?

What is included in the project charter? The items written in the project charter are introduced in many books, but the following contents are summarized briefly.

  • Project purpose
  • Project goals (measurable success criteria)
  • Project outline, work scope
  • Prerequisites / constraints
  • High-level requirements
  • Budget (from rough estimate to the main budget)
  • Risk
  • Summary milestone
  • List stakeholders
  • Project manager name

Depending on the project, the items to be described may increase or decrease, but in general, it is necessary to describe the plan, budget, and risk in detail. The project charter is useful when the project is not going well. You can go back to the start of the project and look back on the original purpose to see if it was out of the direction.

What Is the Primary Purpose of a Project Management Plan?

The primary purpose of the project management plan to describe the path to achieving a project goal. The goal is to keep the project on track. Specifically, the following items.

  • Project objectives and goals
  • Scope
  • Cost
  • Schedule
  • System
  • Quality
  • Communication
  • Risk

There is no fixed type of plan, and the content and amount will vary depending on the company and project scale. Small ones will have tens of pages, and large ones will have more than a hundred pages. You may also change the content as the project progresses.

Project management Tools

One way to manage your project more efficiently is to use a project management tool. Billed is one of the best project management tools; it helps you make the perfect balance between project performance, business goals, and employee morale.

Related Articles: