Project management: What is it? Part 1

Hey 2.0′ers!

I’m back and it’s time to blog again. Today we are going to kick things off by talking about Project Management; What is it, methodologies involved and breaking down the life cycle. In this, part 1, we will be dissecting the first two phases: Project Initiation and Project Planning. Hang around for part 2, which will finalise the phases with Project execution and control, and Project closure.

So without further ado, let’s kick things off.

What is Project Management?

Put simply, project management is the discipline of planning, leading, monitoring and organizing a team and resources in order to effectively bring about the successful completion of a project based on predefined budget, time, quality, scope and resources allocated.

What is the project management life cycle?

That’s a question I get asked quite a lot when consulting with firms on project management and procedural process management alike. In theory, the project management life cycle is dependant on the industry, the methodology used by the manager and other factors - however, there are generally four stages of the project management life cycle. These include Project Initiation, Project Planning, Project execution and control, and Project closure. Let’s take a look at the first two:

1. Project Initiation

In kicking off a project,  the scope of the project is considered very important. Depending on the scenario and the work environment, a project manager is usually chosen with a number of pre-selected team members whose skills the company believes will meet the objectives required to be completed for the project to be successful. However, there are times when the project manager also has the oppurtunity to select his/her team, or just has to settle with who ever is free to be resourced at that time; (generally what happens in the Sydney Web Design and general web design industry).

It is at this stage of the game that the tools required or methodologies which are to be followed (for example PRINCE 2) are selected.

Some documents you should expect as a project manager to complete or work on include:

• Project Charter/Definition
  • This will be a document containing a statement of the scope (the total work needed to complete a project), the projects’ objectives and a listing of team members involved in the project.
• Business Plan
  • A plan of the business goals and how they are going to be acheived - whether short term or long term. I.e. drop legacy systems, etc.

2. Project Planning

The second phase of project management, the planning phase is one of the most important phases. Planning a project correctly can truly mean the difference between failure and success!

Project management planning IDE’s and applications such as Microsoft Project will help you to lay out your project in WBS format. WBS stands for Work Breakdown Structure; an important, principal project management tool which help you to structure a project in a way to define groups of work to be done.

For example, generally speaking a project working off the general SDLC (Software development life cycle) would probably be laid out in the following tree-line structure:

1. Planning
2. Analysis & Information Architecture
3. Design
4. Implementation/development
5. Support/Quality Assurance/Launch

What WBS allows you to control is everything from the subordinate costs for each task as well as materials needed and resources to allocate the work to. In essence, what you see above will obviously then be broken down into smaller, objective-based tasks; hence the ‘breakdown’.

if you are interesed in getting more acquainted the Work Breakdown Structure, head over to another article discussing the Critical Path Method of Project Management.

So there you go guys! Keep clicking around for part 2 which will talk more about project planning and the last two phases of the project management life cycle - as well as more exciting blogging coming up soon!

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Thanks for reading, C2.0