The Basics of Project Management

Knowledge, tools, skills and techniques are important in project management in order to organize, supervise, and control various operations involved in a project. For a person to be effective in project management, he must be able to do the following: supervise or manage and develop a plan for a project, plan, describe, and manage the operations of a project, outline a schedule for a project, determine the budget costs and resources needed, create a plan and perform quality control and quality assurance activities, outline plans for the organization, supervise staff acquisitions, and lastly, assist in team development, recognize risks, prepare mitigation plans, and perform contingency actions. The extent of a project manager's job depends on the size, nature, and complexity of the project that he is involved in.

There are five processes in project management: initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing. Moreover, there are nine areas on management expertise: project integration, project scope, project time, project cost, project quality, project human resources, project communications, project risk management, and project procurement.

The object of integration management is to correlate the different interrelated operations of a project. In order to do a good job at managing such activities, the project manager is expected to come up with a project plan, get approval of the plan, and supervise the execution of all the activities.

A project manager performs scope management by describing scope in terms of project delivery, perform changes to scope when needed, log alternations to scope in the project plan, and disseminate change to scope to major stakeholders. For time and cost management, a project manager needs to prepare a project schedule, outline resources, determine project costs, and track performance closely. The project schedule usually comes out as an activity list. In quality management, the project manager is expected to come up with a quality plan and perform activities related to quality control.

By definition, a quality plan should contain details about the activities that are to be done during the course of the project to meet the requirements of the stakeholders. It does not really matter if the quality plan is formal or informal, but it must be detailed.

Human resource management, on the other hand, is concerned with getting the right people to work for a project. The project manager in human resource does planning of staff and the organization. Team development is also very important and the project manager strives to make improvements to it.

For the human resource project manager to succeed, he must have good organizational planning skills. Furthermore, his job includes clearly defining roles and responsibilities to avoid confusion.

A project manager in communications management strives to promote and improve effective communications between project team members and company stakeholders. To do this, the project manager is expected to devise a communication plan, which contains details on who needs what information and how the said information could be given. The last type of project management is called risk management. Here, the project manager identifies, analyzes, and responds to project risks.