Project management
Once the client's objectives are established, they should influence all decisions made by other people involved in the project– for example, project managers, designers, contractors and subcontractors.
A project is a temporary and unique endeavor designed to produce a product, service or result with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, often constrained by funding or staffing) undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value.
[3][4] The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast with business as usual (or operations),[5] which are repetitive, permanent or semi-permanent functional activities to produce products or services.
[7] In the 1950s, organizations started to apply project-management tools and techniques more systematically to complex engineering projects.
[8] As a discipline, project management developed from several fields of application including civil construction, engineering, and heavy defense activity.
The 1950s marked the beginning of the modern project management era, where core engineering fields came together to work as one.
[13] In the United States, prior to the 1950s, projects were managed on an ad-hoc basis, using mostly Gantt charts and informal techniques and tools.
[17] The information technology industry has also evolved to develop its own form of project management that is referred to as IT project management and which specializes in the delivery of technical assets and services that are required to pass through various lifecycle phases such as planning, design, development, testing, and deployment.
Common among all the project management types is that they focus on three important goals: time, quality, and cost.
Regardless of the methodology employed, careful consideration must be given to the overall project objectives, timeline, and cost, as well as the roles and responsibilities of all participants and stakeholders.
In addition, BRM practices aim to ensure the strategic alignment between project outcomes and business strategies.
These tend to include: After the initiation stage, the project is planned to an appropriate level of detail (see an example of a flowchart).
[37] The main purpose is to plan time, cost, and resources adequately to estimate the work needed and to effectively manage risk during project execution.
As with the Initiation process group, a failure to adequately plan greatly reduces the project's chances of successfully accomplishing its goals.
To maintain budget, scope, effectiveness and pace a project must have physical documents pertaining to each specific task.
[43][44] In turn, recent research in project management has questioned the type of interplay between contracts and integrators.
Project maintenance is an ongoing process, and it includes:[38] In this stage, auditors should pay attention to how effectively and quickly user problems are resolved.
Exact methods were suggested to identify the most informative monitoring points along the project life-cycle regarding its progress and expected duration.
It implements verification and controlling functions during the processing of a project to reinforce the defined performance and formal goals.
If project control is not implemented correctly, the cost to the business should be clarified in terms of errors and fixes.
Control systems are needed for cost, risk, quality, communication, time, change, procurement, and human resources.
A good formal systems development plan outlines: There are five important characteristics of a project: (i) It should always have specific start and end dates.
The ability to adapt to the various internal procedures of the contracting party, and to form close links with the nominated representatives, is essential in ensuring that the key issues of cost, time, quality and above all, client satisfaction, can be realized.
A complete project manager, a term first coined by Robert J. Graham in his simulation, has been expanded upon by Randall L. Englund and Alfonso Bucero.
These are all "soft" people skills that enable project leaders to be more effective and achieve optimized, consistent results.
This overarching multilevel success framework of projects, programs and portfolios has been developed by Paul Bannerman in 2008.
This multilevel success framework conforms to the theory of project as a transformation depicted as the input-process / activity-output-outcome-impact in order to generate whatever value intended.
Risk management applies proactive identification (see tools) of future problems and understanding of their consequences allowing predictive decisions about projects.
Besides programs and portfolios, additional structures that combine their different characteristics are: project networks, mega-projects, or mega-programs.
Mega-projects and mega-programs are defined as exceptional in terms of size, cost, public and political attention, and competencies required.
