What is Project Management
Project Management is the general set of processes and activities required to coordinate and implement changes to your business environment. Some examples of projects are: operational process changes, changes to physical locations or machinery, fulfilling a customer request, developing a new product/service or making a change to an IT system.
Understanding project management starts with defining what a project is. The Project Management Institute (PMI) defines a project as: “A temporary endeavor designed to produce a unique product, service or result with a defined beginning and end undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value”. It is important to note the temporary nature of projects in contrast to ongoing operations (business as usual) which are semi-permanent. Projects are the way companies make changes.
Project Management is a set of processes used to organize, coordinate and implement projects. This includes initiating, planning, executing, controlling(monitoring) and closing the project. Projects are often lead and managed by trained resources (Project Managers) who use industry standards, personal experience, organizational processes and a set of supporting tools and templates to give the project structure, manage information and facilitate collaboration among project team members.
Project Management for IT
IT project management is a sub-discipline of project management wherein technology projects are planned, executed and controlled. IT is one of the most common places where project management is found within an organization. Most IT investments and initiatives fit the “project” profile with a constrained timeline, a defined scope, desired outcome/objectives and a set of project resources that must be coordinated.
IT project management starts at the portfolio level where the strategic vision of the organization is transformed into value measures and the identification of investments to create value. Most organizations have a limited set of financial, human and technical resource available, so project portfolio management helps the IT organization select the best projects for generating the desired value with the resources available. By using structured project management processes to deliver the projects in the portfolio, the organization can track project performance and value delivery at each step in the project lifecycle.
Over the past few years, there have been some popular variations of IT project management adopted by companies including: waterfall methodologies, agile or iterative approaches and more specialized techniques like Scrum. Each of these variations has unique characteristics that impact the timing of value realization, the way team members interact and the way the project is integrated with other projects in the organization’s portfolio.