What is a Project?
• Along with mass production and batch production, a project is one type of standard production system.
• Projects are characterised by having one-off and unique objectives and characteristics.
What is Project Management?
• Project management involves devising, managing and controlling the pro-cess required to achieve safe completion of a project on time, within cost and to the required standards of quality.
• Traditional planning and control techniques consider time, cost and qual-ity planning and control, but project management seeks to consider and evaluate each one concurrently.
• Generally, as industry has evolved, it has become more complex. This has resulted in more and more complex projects, which created a need for more effective ways to manage them.
• The project manager’s role has evolved to be able to view a project’s time, cost and quality variables within the context of the whole operating system.
• In most cases, the objective of the project team is to meet the success criteria for the project and then to disband. Few other aspects of enterprises have such requirements.
• Project management operates largely within existing organisations.
• Projects operating within functional structures offer good flexibility in the use of people. Staff are primarily employed to perform a functional task, but are temporarily assigned to a project that requires their particular expertise.
• In addition, individual experts can be used effectively on a number of projects. If there is a broad base of expertise within a functional department, it can be employed on different projects with relative ease.
• The ‘within function’ structure also has the advantage that specialist know-ledge can be easily shared within the function and utilised effectively by the project team. Continuity of expertise, procedures and administration is maintained within the function, despite any personnel changes that might occur.
• The project manager heads the project organisation and operates indepen-dently of the normal chain of command.
• The project manager is the single focal point for bringing together all efforts in pursuit of the project objectives.
• The project manager is responsible for integrating people from different functional disciplines who are working on the project.
• The project manager negotiates directly with functional managers for sup-port. Functional managers usually remain responsible for individual work tasks and personnel within the project, while the project manager is respon-sible for integrating and overseeing the start and completion of activities.
• The project focuses on delivering a particular product or service at a certain time and cost, and to a particular quality standard. In contrast, functional units must maintain an ongoing pool of resources to support their organisa-tion’s goals. As a result, conflict may occur between functional and project interests.
• Decision making, accountability, outcomes and rewards are shared among members of the project team and the functional units.
• Though the project organisation is temporary, the functional units from which it is formed may be permanent. When a project ends, the project organisation is disbanded and people return to their functional units or are assigned to new projects.
• Projects can originate at different places in the organisation. Product devel-opment and related projects tend to originate from marketing, whereas technology applications originate in research and development, and so on.
• Project management sets into motion numerous other support functions, such as personnel evaluation, accounting, and information systems.
• Given the temporary nature of a project, an organisation working on projects must be flexible so that it can alter structure and resources to meet the shifting requirements of different projects.
• In a project system, the product is a one-off non-repetitive element. As a result of this, there is no learning curve and high levels of complex management planning and control are required.
• The concept of project management has evolved in order to plan, co-ordinate and control the many complex and often diverse activities involved in modern-day commercial projects.
• Project management is principally the general management of an organisa-tion within an organisaorganisa-tion. Good project management requires the effective application of all the general manager’s skills to achieve the projects goals.
• Project management employs the whole range of functional management areas, and skills are often required in each of these areas in order to secure project success.
• Project teams are set up to undertake projects of every type. They may deal with single projects where all resources are dedicated to achieving the objective of that project, or they may be responsible for multiple projects where the resources have to be managed across projects.
• Projects can be external where they are carried out for a client outside the organisation. These are normally defined by a binding contract and are usually a main revenue source for the organisation.
• Projects can be internal where they are generally set up to improve the operations of the organisation and the client would be an internal client.
Characteristics of Project Management
• Project management is unique in that it uses both international and specific industry benchmarks.
• Project management is also unique in that it represents an entirely new profession that gives professional advice in relation to the full life cycle of a project, from inception to completion.
• Project management assumes responsibility for optimising time, cost and quality performance for a project. Under the project management philo-sophy, it is not acceptable to consider any of these variables in isolation, because each of them has a bearing on the eventual performance of the others.
• Project management is concerned with ensuring that the project success criteria are met. However, project management recognises that there is more than one success criterion. There is no point in completing on time and on cost if the quality of the finished product is lower than specified by the client.
• For each of the variables of time, cost and quality, there should be a mini-mum acceptable condition. Project management is concerned with meeting or exceeding these minimum criteria in all cases.
• Project management often involves using fully trained project management professionals to run projects, rather than designers or others acting as managers.
• The modern concept of project management includes the evolution of the professional project manager.
Potential Benefits and Challenges of Project Management
• Some of the obvious benefits of using a project management approach are that it makes more efficient use of company resources, it offers reduced disruption of routine operational activities, and it offers greater motivation potential for people working in projects.
• Project management also offers greater visibility of strategies and concepts within the organisation as a whole, the promotion of healthy competition between organisation projects, and full life cycle cost consideration at each stage.
• Project management can provide clearer management, individual account-ability and responsibility, a shorter time from development to market, clearer control of expenditure, and better use of resources.
• Project management can also provide clearer communication on progress and input to strategic plans, improved control and security of classified and sensitive information, and improved team building and team spirit.
• There are also challenges to using project management as an approach. In order for a project management system to work, key staff are taken from functional units for a proportion of their time. If not properly controlled, this could damage the performance of the functional unit.
• Projects will inevitably compete, at least to some extent, for limited and finite organisational resources.
• Functional managers tend to be less visible and flexible than project man-agers.
• Increased staff flexibility is also required. Staff have to be re-deployed when the project terminates. There may be problems with this if the functional staff have been working on the project to a large extent, and/or for a significant amount of time.
The History of Project Management
• Modern project management has evolved from the basic principles estab-lished during the development of the Los Alamos project in the USA in 1944. The atomic bomb project was the first really complex, high-technology project operated by mankind, and the need for a new management approach was identified.
• By the mid 1950s, the size and complexity of many projects had increased to such an extent that the well developed management techniques of the first half of the twentieth century were unable to cope. The US defence industry was finding it difficult to control the costs and time schedules of its large-scale weapons systems projects, and some very large cost and time overruns occurred. The solution was to further develop the Los Alamos principles into what we now call project management.
• The discipline was developed and led to the formation of the Project Man-agement Institute in the USA and the Association for Project ManMan-agement (APM) in the UK in the 1960s.
• Throughout the 1960s, additional methods emerged to help project man-agers; but the next real milestone was the development of cheap and reliable computers in the early 1980s.
• The APM produced its Body of Knowledge in 1988, and assisted greatly in the preparation of BS6079 in 1996 and ISO10006 in 1997. These reference works document British and European standards for project management practice and in many ways mark the frontiers of the development of the discipline as a profession today.
Project Management Today
• Project management is now used by numerous different disciplines, and has evolved into an integral management component for a wide range of industries.
• Project managers are increasingly being accepted as fundamental contribu-tors to the operational process.
• Project management today has evolved into an internationally important discipline. As a profession, it is growing rapidly in many countries.