Project Management

Project management is the discipline of defining and achieving targets while optimizing the use of resources (time, money, people, materials, energy, space, etc) over the course of a project (a set of activities of finite duration).

Project management is quite often the province and responsibility of an individual project manager. This individual seldom participates directly in the activities that produce the end result, but rather strives to maintain the progress and productive mutual interaction of various parties in such a way that overall risk of failure is reduced.

Typical projects include the engineering and construction of various objects or consumer products, including buildings, vehicles, or electronic devices. The duration of a project is the time from its start to its completion, which can take days, weeks, months or even years.

In contrast to on-going, functional work, a project is "a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service."

Project management activities

Project Management is composed of several different types of activities such as:

1. Planning the work
2. Estimating resources
3. Organizing the work
4. Acquiring human and material resources
5. Assigning tasks
6. Directing activities
7. Controlling project execution
8. Reporting progress

Project control variables

Project management tries to gain control over five variables:

• time - The amount of time required to complete the project. Typically broken down for analytical purposes into the time required to complete the components of the project, which is then further broken down into the time required to complete each task contributing to the completion of each component.
• cost - Calculated from the time variable. Cost to develop an internal project is time multiplied by the cost of the team members involved. When hiring an independant consultant for a project, cost will typically be determined by the consultant or firm's hourly rate multiplied by an estimated time to complete.
• quality - The amount of time put into individual tasks determines the overall quality of the project. Some tasks may require a given amount of time to complete adequately, but given more time could be completed exceptionally. Over the course of a large project, quality can have a significant impact on time and cost (or vice versa).
• scope - Requirements specified for the end result. The overall definition of what the project is supposed to accomplish, and a specific description of what the end result should be or accomplish.
• risk - Potential points of failure. Most risks or potential failures can be overcome or resolved, given enough time.

Three of these variables can be given by external or internal customers. The value(s) of the remaining variable(s) is/are then set by project management, ideally based on solid estimation techniques. The final values have to be agreed upon in a negotiation process between project management and the customer. Usually, the values in terms of time, cost, quality and scope are contracted.

To keep control over the project from the beginning of the project all the way to its natural conclusion, a project manager uses a number of techniques: project planning, earned value, risk management, scheduling, process improvement....

History of project management

Project management was not used as an isolated concept before the Sputnik crisis of the Cold War. After this crisis, the United States Department of Defense needed to speed up the military project process. New tools (models) for achieving this goal were invented. In 1958 they invented the Program Evaluation and Review Technique or PERT, as part of the Polaris missile submarine program. At the same time, the DuPont corporation invented a similar model called CPM, critical path method. PERT was later extended with a work breakdown structure or WBS. The process flow and structure of the military undertakings quickly spread into many private enterprises.

There are a number of guiding techniques that have been developed over the years that can be used to formally specify exactly how the project will be managed. These include Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), and such ideas as the Personal Software Process (PSP), and the Team Software Process (TSP) and PRINCE2. These techniques attempt to standardize the practices of the development team making them easier to predict and manage as well as track.

Approaches

There are several approaches that can be taken to managing project activities including agile, iterative, incremental, and phased approaches.

A traditional phased approach identifies a sequence of steps to be completed. This contrasts with the agile software development approach at the other end of the spectrum in which the project is seen as a series of relatively small tasks conceived and executed as the situation demands in an adaptive manner, rather than as a completely pre-planned process.

The traditional approach

In the traditional approach, we can distinguish 5 components of a project (4 stages plus control) in the development of a project:

1. project initiation (Kickoff)
2. project planning
3. project production or execution
4. project monitoring or controlling
5. project completion

Not all projects will visit every stage as projects can be terminated before they reach completion. Some projects probably don't have the planning and/or the monitoring. Some projects will go through steps 2, 3 and 4 multiple times.

Many industries utilize variations on these stages. For example, in bricks and mortar architectural design, projects typically progress through stages like Pre-Planning, Conceptual Design, Schematic Design, Design Development, Construction Drawings (or Contract Documents), and Construction Administration. While the names may differ from industry to industry, the actual stages typically follow common steps to problem solving--defining the problem, weighing options, choosing a path, implementation and evaluation.

Critical chain is the latest extension to the traditional critical path method.

In critical studies of project management, it has been noted that several of these fundamentally PERT-based models are not well suited for the multi-project company environment of today. Most of them are aimed at very large-scale, one-time, non-routine projects, and nowadays all kinds of management are expressed in terms of projects. Using complex models for "projects" (or rather "tasks") spanning a few weeks has been proven to cause unnecessary costs and low maneuverability in several cases. Instead project management experts try to identify different "lightweight" models, such as, for example Extreme Programming for software development and Scrum techniques. The generalization of extreme programming to other kinds of projects is extreme project management, which may be used in combination with the process modeling and management principles of human interaction management.

Process-based management

Also furthering the concept of project control is the incorporation of process-based management. This area has been driven by the use of Maturity models such as the CMMi (Capability Maturity Model Integration) and ISO/IEC15504 (SPICE - [[Software Process Improvement Capability ent is far more successful.

Agile project management approaches based on the principles of human interaction management are founded on a process view of HUMAN collaboration..

Project management standards and professional certification

There have been several attempts to develop project management standards, such as:

• ISO 10006:1997, Quality management - Guidelines to quality in project management
• A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide)
• PRINCE2 (Projects IN a Controlled Environment)
• V-Modell (German project management method)
• ISEB Project Management Syllabus

See also: An exhaustive list of standards (maturity models)

So far, there is no known attempt to develop a project management standard available under the GNU Free Documentation License. There is a proposed Project Management XML Schema.

Case Studies

• Salvage of the Port of Massawa, Eritrea, 1942. The port was a chaotic mess. Access had been blocked with scuttled ships and port facilities had been wrecked. Captain Edward Ellsberg, a US Navy salvage expert, rapidly salvaged scuttled ships for service in the Allied merchant fleets. He also salvaged a large floating dry dock and returned port shops and facilities to operation. Ellsberg had very limited resources and poor administrative support. Ellsberg's efforts show that a project oriented expert can accomplish a nearly insurmountable task. Interestingly, Ellsberg had virtually no support staff and few skilled. He planned and managed the entire project by himself. Ellsberg, an accomplished author, documented this case in Under the Red Sea Sun (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1946). That is a World War II memoir with a difference.

• The Great Escape, 1944. The escape from Stalag Luft III in 1944 is documented in The Great Escape (New York: Norton, 1950) by Paul Brickhill. In this case, a large, highly-decentralized organization worked toward the goal of a mass escape over a long period of time. This shows how an ad hoc group can use diverse talents to accomplish a difficult task under very adverse circumstances. This highly dramatic episode lent itself dramatization in the movie, The Great Escape, in 1963. The Longest Tunnel by Alan Burgess is another excellent account of this event.

See also

• Building construction
• Capability Maturity Model
• Construction Management
• Critical chain
• Critical path
• Dependency Structure Matrix
• Earned value management
• Functionality, mission and scope creep
• Gantt chart
• Governance
• Human Interaction Management
• Management
• Project accounting
• Program management
• Project management software (List_of_project_management_software)
• RACI diagram
• The Mythical Man-Month
• Thinklets
• Timesheet
• Work Breakdown Structure

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Project management

• American Academy of Project Management
• International Project Management Association
• Association for Project Management
• The Project Management Institute