Unit 5.1 Why organisations use project management

Mariusz SobczykUncategorized  10th Jan 2019 12 Minutes

At the beginning I would like to say that in different sources we can find different principles of project management but some of them are the same everywhere.

Project management is really important and it can save you a lot of costs and time. This report will demonstrate the importance of a good project manager to think about Business justification, defined roles and responsibilities and manage exceptions. The report will show how clear project management should be defied by stages, focus on products and learn from experience.

which affect the project and how each action can be associated with the entire project. In this report, I will try to describe the principles of project management and benefits of project management to organisations and individuals.

Everything that is associated with a project should be important for us and we should think about each action. If we consider everything, every step, every process it can improve our project. If we do it the results should be better than if we will do nothing.

image source: http://www.virtualprojectconsulting.com/discover-the-basic-principles-of-project-management-training/

1.1 The principles of project management.

We can find the basic principles of project management.

Project management is a composite activity with multiple dimensions. Depending on the type and class of project, this management activity can be very complex. In a nutshell, project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, securing, managing, leading, and controlling resources to achieve specific goals.

The very basics of project management are as follows: a project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or deliverables) that an organization takes to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or add value.

The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honoring the pre-defined constraints. The primary constraints are scope, time, quality, and budget. The secondary—and more ambitious—challenge is to optimize the allocation of necessary inputs and integrate them to meet pre-defined objectives.

For a successful project, the following project management principles are necessary assets when charting a path to completion. These principles of project management can be applied to any level or branch of a project that falls under a different area of responsibility in the overall project organization:

• Project structure
• Definition phase
• Clear goals
• Transparency about project status
• Risk recognition
• Managing project disturbances
• Responsibility of the project manager
• Project success

Project Structure

Project management typically revolves around three parameters – Quality, Resources, and Time. A project structure can usually be successfully created by considering:

1. Project Goal

An answer to the question “What has to be done” is usually a good starting point when setting a project goal. This question leads to the project structure plan. This plan consists of work packages which represent enclosed work units that can be assigned to a personnel resource. These work packages and their special relationships represent the project structure.

2. Project Timeline and Order

A flowchart is a powerful tool to visualize the starting point, the endpoint, and the order of work packages in a single chart.

3. Project Milestones

Milestones define certain phases of your project and the corresponding costs and results. Milestones represent decisive steps during the project. They are set after a certain number of work packages that belong together. This series of work packages leads to the achievement of a sub-goal.

Definition Phase

The definition phase is where many projects go wrong. This can happen when no clear definition, or when the definition is muddled due to the involvement of too many stakeholders. Successful definition must involve the entire team at every step to facilitate acceptance and commitment to the project.

Clear Goals

The project manager is responsible for the achievement of all project goals. These goals should always be defined using the SMART paradigm (specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic, time-bound). With nebulous goals, a project manager can be faced with a daily grind of keeping everything organized. It will work decidedly to your advantage to clearly define goals before the project begins.

Transparency About the Project Status

Your flowcharts, structure plan, and milestone plan are useful tools to help you stay on track. As project manager, you should be able to present a brief report about the status of the project to your principal or stakeholders at each stage of the project. At such meetings, you should be able to give overviews about the costs, the timeline, and the achieved milestones.

Risk Recognition

It’s the duty of the project manager to evaluate risks regularly. You should come into every project with the knowledge that all projects come with a variety of risks. This is normal. Always keep in mind that your project is a unique endeavor with strict goals concerning costs, appointments, and performance. The sooner you identify these risks, the sooner you can address negative developments.

Managing Project Disturbances

It’s not very likely that you have enough personal capacity to identify each single risk that may occur. Instead, work to identify the big risks and develop specific strategies to avoid them. Even if you’re no visionary, you should rely on your skillset, knowledge, and instincts in order to react quickly and productively when something goes wrong.

Responsibility Of The Project Manager

The Project Manager develops the Project Plan with the team and manages the team’s performance of project tasks. The Project Manager is also responsible for securing acceptance and approval of deliverables from the Project Sponsor and Stakeholders. The Project Manager is responsible for communication, including status reporting, risk management, and escalation of issues that cannot be resolved in the team—and generally ensuring the project is delivered within budget, on schedule, and within scope.

Project managers of all projects must possess the following attributes along with the other project related responsibilities:

• Knowledge of technology in relation to project products
• Understanding Management concepts
• Interpersonal skills for clear communications that help get things done
• Ability to see the project as an open system and understand the external-internal interactions

Project Success

Project success is a multi-dimensional construct that can mean different things to different people. It is best expressed at the beginning of a project in terms of key and measurable criteria upon which the relative success or failure of the project may be judged. For example, some generally used success criteria include:

• Meeting key project objectives such as the business objectives of the sponsoring organization, owner or user
• Eliciting satisfaction with the project management process, i.e., the deliverable is complete, up to standard, is on time and within budget
• Reflecting general acceptance and satisfaction with the project’s deliverable on the part of the project’s customer and the majority of the project’s community at some time in the future.

On the projectsmart website, Simon Buehring writes about  the Seven principles of project management.

1. Business justification: every project should lead to a worthwhile return on investment. In other words, we need to understand the benefits that a particular project will bring, before committing ourselves to any significant expenditure. During the life cycle of a project, however, circumstances can change quickly. If at any point it becomes clear that a return on investment is no longer feasible, then the project should be scrapped and no more money wasted.
2. Defined roles and responsibilities: everybody working on the project needs to understand the nature of their involvement: for what is each person responsible, and to whom are they accountable? Without clear roles and responsibilities, nobody will know precisely what he or she is supposed to be doing (and everybody will pass the buck at the first sign of trouble). In such a chaotic environment, the progress of the project will be seriously jeopardised.
3. Manage by exception: project sponsors should avoid getting too bogged down in the day-to-day running of projects and instead allow the project manager to concentrate on this area. Micro-management by a sponsor is a hindrance, not a help. Project sponsors should set clear boundaries for cost and time, with which the manager should work. If he/she cannot provide the agreed deliverables within these constraints, concerns must be escalated to the sponsor for a decision.
4. Manage by stages: break the project up into smaller chunks, or stages. Each stage marks a point at which the project sponsor will make key decisions. For example, is the project still worthwhile? Are the risks still acceptable? Dividing a project into stages, and only committing to one stage at a time, is a low risk approach that enables the sponsor to manage by exception.
5. Focus on products: it is vital that clients and customers think carefully about the products, or deliverables, they require, before the project begins. The clearer they can be about their requirements, the more realistic and achievable the plans that can be produced. This makes managing the project much easier and less risky.
6. Learn from experience: don’t risk making the same mistakes on every project; consider why certain aspects went well or badly, then incorporate the lessons learned into your approach to your next project. Humans have an amazing capacity to learn, but when it comes to repeating errors made during previous projects, we all too often fail to learn the lessons.
7. Tailor to suit the environment: whatever project management methodology or framework you favour, it must be tailored to suit the needs of your project. Rather than blindly following a methodology, the project manager must be able to adapt procedures to meet the demands of the work in hand. How you plan on a two-week project is likely to be very different from how you plan on a two-year project.

The project management principles discussed here can be applied universally, irrespective of language, geography or culture. These principles have been proven in practice over many years; adhere to them, rather than struggle on without a coherent strategy, and you will have a greater chance of project success.

We can also read about 12 principles of project management on the chronicle.com.

• Projects are temporary. You can’t consider a project to be that thing that you’re going to do every day for the rest of your career. Instead, it’s something that creates a particular product or service, and it has a clear end point. You might compare it to the creation of a syllabus or teaching a course. It has a finite beginning and end.
• Decide whether or not the project should happen. Not every project should be begun started. When you are beginning work on something, you want to determine if it’s a good use of your resources, what problem the project is trying to solve, and whether or not the project is the best way to fix it. I think that this is particularly hard in universities because we tend to originate our own projects rather than having them brought to us (more on this below). It can be very difficult to admit that what you’ve been wanting to do isn’t worth the time, money, and/or effort. But we have to be willing to call a spade a spade.
• Consider risks. If you’re going to tackle the project after all, you should analyze your potential risks. What events might derail the project? What are the likelihood of them happening? Working together to brainstorm what these things will help you plan for the events that seem most likely or severe. For example, your entire digital humanities project could be derailed by a server failure. For this reason, you should probably be obsessive about backup.
• Cost, time, and quality are co-dependent. In other words, once a project has been started, you can’t change its timeline without directly affecting its cost or quality. You can’t expect to get something done faster without either paying more orsacrificing some quality. This is why getting a plumber to your house at 10pm costs more than waiting for the next day. The same thing applies to any project you undertake with a team.
• Know what’s out of bounds. Determining what your project will not do is just as important as determining what it will since that can help prevent mission creep in the future.
• Develop a project plan with clear activities. At the beginning of a project, the size or scope of the task might seem overwhelming. (Ask anyone who’s ever tried writing a book!) However, breaking things into small and manageable chunks can help you eat that proverbial elephant. When working on a team, you should have these chunks start with a verb so your team members clearly know what you’re asking them to do.
• When making assignments, consider people’s interest as much as their skills and experience. Just because someone has a ton of experience designing websites doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing that he wants to do. Letting people choose how they want to be involved in the project allows them to develop personally as well as helping the project.
  
• Let the person taking an assignment set the due date. It can be hard to manage a project and not come off as an ogre at times. But one way to shed the Shrek this is to let those who are getting the assignments decide when they can complete them. Their estimates won’t always be 100% accurate, but they will not have the excuse of it being a deadline that is imposed on them. Moreover, getting a team member’s input helps them feel more connected to the project.
• There are lots of project management tools; just use what works for you. This is pretty self-explanatory and is the subject of this great thread at DHAnswers(see previous ProfHacker coverage here, here, and here). If post-its and emails work for your team, then go for it. If you need to use Basecamp and can get others to do so, that’s fine too. In the end, it’s not the tool so much as the relationships that count for being successful at a project. As our instructor said, “A fool with a tool is still a fool.”
• There can only be one. In a progressive, neo-liberal environment (read, university), we tend to want to let everyone get involved in decision making. In the end, however, you can’t really share project management duties. One person needs to be chief. But it also doesn’t have to be you all the time.
• Set meeting ground rules. It’s true that bad meetings are your fault—especially if you’re the project manager. Getting your team to agree collectively to how meetings will work will help things run smoothly in the future. And be sure to only hold meetings when they are necessary.
• Celebrate success. Since projects are finite, they will have an end…no matter how far off that might seem at present. When you get to this point, make sure that you figure out some way to celebrate the accomplishment. A celebration doesn’t have to cost a lot of money—or any—but recognizing others’ contributions and the completion of the goal is important.

1.2 The benefits of project management to organisations and individuals.

What is the benefits of project management? So the main benefits will be the following and they are associated with organisations and individuals.

• Better control of financial, physical, and human resources
• Improved customer relations
• Shorter development times
• Lower costs

Benefits of project management

On the nibusinessinfo we can read about the main advantage of project management is that is helps you to manage your projects effectively, enabling you to resolve problems more quickly. It takes time and money to manage a project, however following good practices can help you:

• improve your chances of achieving the desired result
• gain a fresh perspective on your project, and how it fits with your business strategy
• prioritise your business’ resources and ensure their efficient use
• set the scope, schedule and budget accurately from the start
• stay on schedule and keep costs and resources to budget
• improve productivity and quality of work
• encourage consistent communications amongst staff, suppliers and clients
• satisfy the various needs of the project’s stakeholders
• mitigate risks of a project failing
• increase customer satisfaction
• gain competitive advantage and boost your bottom line

Conclusion

This report has considered how project management can be helpful for us. That a project manage should consider structure, goals, risk recognition, and responsibilities.

The report looked at the importance of the definition phase where many projects go wrong. The report considered that successful definition must involve the entire team at every step to facilitate acceptance and commitment to the project.

We should remember also about following principles:

• Business justification
• Defined roles and responsibilities
• Manage by exception
• Manage by stages
• Focus on products
• Learn from experience
• Tailor to suit the environment

If we think about benefits of project management to organisations and individuals we think about:

• Better control of financial, physical, and human resources
• Improved customer relations
• Shorter development times
• Lower costs

So like we see a lot of things can have an impact on our project but if we will do everything about what I wrote above everything should be OK and it should be more beneficial for us.

References:

https://www.simplilearn.com/project-management-basic-principles-article – accessed on 10.01.19

https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/seven-key-principles-of-project-management.php – accessed on 10.01.19

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/12-basic-principles-of-project-management/31421 – accessed on 10.01.19

https://www.nibusinessinfo.co.uk/content/advantages-project-management – accessed on 10.01.19

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