What is Project Management
Project Management is a term that has been used to describe many processes and many jobs. In some companies, being made a project manager is akin to being taken out to pasture; it’s what they do with people while they wait for the next round of redundancies to be approved. In other companies, project managers may be some of the highest paid and most influential employees.
Outside business, the term project manager isn’t so common, but the skills and procedures are actually more widely spread.
Some examples of managing a project include the following:
- Organising a 6-year-old’s birthday party.
- Building yourself a shed in the back garden.
- Employing contractors to build you a deck.
- Arranging a wedding.
- Planning an overseas trip.
- Setting up an annual festival.
- Making a short film for YouTube.
- Running a training course at a community college.
- Writing a book.
A project is any undertaking of reasonably complexity that has a start and a finish. You can find a more formal definition here[LINK], but the idea of a start and a finish is the crux of it.
If you’re coordinating a project, then you are in effect a project manager.
One of the first decisions in the planning of a project should be to decide how formally it should be managed. If there are few tasks to be completed and there is little money involved, with little risk of disastrous outcomes, then your project management method is likely to be commensurately simple. If your project involves large numbers of individual tasks, or lots of people, or lots of dollars, or has the potential for risky outcomes, then more rigour would be advisable.
No matter how simple your project, I believe you will benefit from being familiar with Project Management techniques. You may not need to put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard), but by being aware of project management techniques, you will have a clearer understanding of what needs to be done, and you will also be able to recognise situations where a more formal methodology would be prudent.
For very complex, high cost and/or high risk projects, you will want to complete a formal course of study or employ a professional project manager. In such cases, this web site can still provide some background and suggestions, but more will be required.