Why Project Management?

Failure; noun, definition: lack of success.

Unfortunately, failure is a popular topic with people wanting to nip it in the bud. No-one likes to fail, in fact, people often don’t embark on a certain journey or venture through fear of failure.

Fewer than a third of all projects were successfully completed on time and on budget over the past year, the failures were due to negligent management of the task at hand.

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With high-performing organisations successfully completing 89% of their projects, while low performers complete only 35%, it’s high time that professionals started to understand that project management is key to enterprise success.

Let’s get down to basics: project management is defined as the discipline of initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria.

The idea that project management is a needless overhead is surprisingly common, but this idea is most prominent in small organisations and organisations that have yet to adopt project management in their business operations and processes.

The key factor that distinguishes project management from management is that it has a final deliverable, a finite timespan, unlike management which is an ongoing process. This means that project professionals, especially Project Managers, need technical skills as well as the ability to manage people and business awareness.

Project management enables you to collect your requirements regarding your project, this constitutes the “scope” of your project, which is what the project will deliver.

The requirements of the project are the schedule or the time it takes, the budget of the project and how much it will cost and the quality parameters.

With a lot to be defined, project management enables you to plan and coordinate activities more effectively and in a structured way, helping overall business efficiency.

Now, I know it seems daunting, but don’t worry, it means that failure won’t be a word in your dictionary.

In the next instalment of our project management series, we’ll be giving you a brief overview of project management methodologies. Thank you for reading!