ARTICLE 10 - PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Disciplines of Project Management

The application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to a broad range of activities to meet the requirements of the particular project.

Project management knowledge and practices are best described in terms of their component processes. These processes can be placed into five process groups and nine knowledge areas.

The five process groups are initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing. The nine knowledge areas are project integration management, project scope management, project time management, project cost management, project quality management, project human resource management, project communications management, project risk management and project procurement management.

Software support tool

Data Saab developed the first software support tool for project management for their computer D21 in the early 1960s. It was tailored to support the PERT model. Nowadays project-planning software is widely used and abused.

The software industry research company, Gartner (), periodically publish the "Project Management Software Magic Quadrant Report", a review of major packages ().

Problems with project management software

Few packages are built around a sound project management method. What is even worse, e.g. Microsoft Project encourages counterproductive behavior by inexperienced project managers by offering as the default start-up view the Gantt chart.

This encourages too early focus on task identification and scheduling vs. proper formulation of project objectives and final deliverables. So, such packages implicitly force upon an unsuspecting user an unsound project management process.

To make things worse, many packages offer advanced visual formatting capabilities, which make it possible to produce nicely looking but completely nonsense documents.

Many packages also offer e-mail integration, which encourages automatic assignment of tasks and due dates. This universally leads to counterproductive, date-driven behavior (see: critical chain) and may contribute to improper setting of team members' performance expectations.

Project Portfolio Management is Your Friend

Three reasons for project managers to embrace PPM—Realism, Rationality, and Visibility. Project portfolio management (PPM) is HOT.

PPM brings realism to an organization's planning processes. The Balanced Scorecard Collaborative estimates that upwards of 80% of corporate strategies are never implemented.

PPM aligns what an organization wants to do with the resources—the money, hours, people, time, and equipment—required to get it done.

Inventory your department's projects. Gather information about project portfolio management tools and educate yourself on their use.

SOURCE: http://www.management-hub.com/project-management.html