What is Project Management?

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives.

A project is an undertaken to create a unique product or service which brings about beneficial change or added value, having specific start and completion dates. This characteristic of projects stands in sharp contrast to processes, or operations, which are permanent or semi-permanent functional work to repetitively produce the same product or service. In practice, the management of these two systems is often found to be quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and the adoption of separate management philosophy, which is the subject of this article.

The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honoring the project constraints. Typical constraints are scope, time and budget. The secondary—and more ambitious—challenge is to optimize the allocation and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives. A project is a carefully defined set of activities that use resources (money, people, materials, energy, space, provisions, communication, motivation, etc.) to achieve the project goals and objectives.

Next week we will look at different Project Management Approaches that will help you to establish which approach can work for your specific business need.