What is a Project?
A project is a temporary attempt undertaken to build a unique product, service or result. A project is defined as temporary because it has a defined start and end time, and it is unique because it has a particular set of operations designed to accomplish a goal
The primary characteristics of the project:
- It has a definite start and end point
- Once the end point is reached, the project is complete
- It is attempting to achieve something new
- Project must meet the stakeholder or customer requirements
What is Project Management?
Project Management is a discipline to plan, organize, motivate, and control the resources to achieve specific project goals. The main objective of project management is to achieve project goals and targets while keeping in mind the project scope, time, quality, and cost. It facilitates the project workflow with team collaboration on a single project.
Project management actually began in the early 1950s. The need for project management arose after observing the benefits of organizing work within the project and the critical need to coordinate across different departments and professionals.
Project management mainly deals with these ten areas
- Integration
- Cost
- Human resources
- Stakeholder management
- Scope
- Quality
- Communications
- Time
- Procurement
- Risk Management
Objectives of Project Management
While preparing a project, you should look into these perspectives, which helps to give a much better understanding of the whole process.
Following are the main Software Project Management Objectives:
- How does the project fit into the organization?
- How will the project evolve over time?
- What skills are required to manage the project successfully?
- Development and Implementation of procedures
- Efficient communication, collaboration, and productive guidelines
- Achieve project goals within the estimated time with high quality
- Allocate and optimize necessary resources to meet project goals
- Meet the exclusive needs and requirements of the client
Project Management Methodologies
Here are the various methodologies available for Project Management:
- Prince2
- Agile
- Six Sigma
- Scrum
- Kanban
- Lean
- Waterfall
We will look each of this into in a later part of the tutorial. Various tools are available to track project tasks and measure accomplishments during the project. These includes Gantt charts, PERT charts and Work down structures.
Summary
- Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, motivating and controlling resources to achieve specific goals.
- Project management deals with various aspect of projects like
- Cost
- Human resources
- Stakeholder management
- Scope
- Quality
- Communications
- Time
- Procurement, etc.
- Various tools used to track project tasks and measure accomplishments during the project includes Gantt charts, PERT charts, etc.
- There are various methodologies that are available for project management like Prince2, Agile, Six Sigma, etc.