Project Management

Before understanding Project management, let’s understand what is not project management?

Our daily routine work like bringing milk from Mother dairy booth, dropping spouse at their office or picking children from their School or any other ongoing activities like having food, cleaning room is not a project. A normal activity like assigning tasks to your team members, taking follow-ups of reports from them, attending meetings is not a Project. Then what is a Project? Above are examples of business as usual.

A project is any activity that gives you a unique outcome, a result of service. It is time-bound and a temporary endeavor that means the project has a definite start and ends point. Its duration may be short or long but it doesn’t mean endless work going on forever as business as usual or routine work. One more feature of a project is that it drives a change. From a business perspective, a project’s goal is moving an organization from one state to another state in order to achieve a specific target. At the beginning of a project, the organization is referred to as being in the current state. The desired result of the change driven by the project is described as a future state.

Project is generally cross-functional in nature means not related to only one field. It can be in any field. One very important characteristic of a project is that it has more risk associated to work i.e. the outcome of a project is always uncertain in nature. We cannot say anything concrete on an outcome of a project; it may be anything either positive or negative; or good or bad, depending upon the situation how the project had been handled and the environment thereon while doing so.

These are some differences between businesses as usual and project work.

Now, let’s see how the project is being managed and the popular way of managing the project work?

There are two popular methodologies for Project Management. The first one is the Waterfall and the second one is the Agile model.

The waterfall model is sequential in nature; projects are well planned at the beginning with a definite budget and time period for completion of the project; well documented but generally rigid to accept change. The big advantage model is that the Risks associated with the project are well-identified at an early stage and planned, so the outcome of the project is delivered at the desired time. Examples of this model are Real Estate work (building or flat construction) and Car manufacturing (new car launching – from concept to design). PMP (Project Management Professional) is the most popular example of the waterfall model. While in the Agile model, rapid changes are frequently accepted in the project. So, early detection of risks is not possible; so budget and completion of time vary rapidly. Agile is well flexible to accommodate any or late charges in the project. The popular models that use the agile methodologies are PRiNCE2 and SCRUM. They are much popular in SDLC (software development life cycle) and Mobile manufacturing etc.