What is Project Managment?

Project management is a carefully planned and organized effort to accomplish a specific project, implementation, or execution that meets and exceeds a defined set of goals and objectives.

Project management follows clearly defined phases to help meet these goals and objectives, and tracks the progress of these phases along a timeline. In accordance with the tracking of the timeline for completeing these phases and tasks, costs, resources, and materials are also tracked.

When implementing a project, the most common phases can be broken down into
1) Research or Useasibility studies (Discovery Phase)
2) Project Scope definition (Definition Phase)
3) Project planning, timing, resources, costs and materials estimations (Definition Phase)
4) Project Design (Design Phase)
5) Project Implementation or Development (Development Phase)
6) Project evaluation, review, or testing (QA Phase)
7) Project launch (Launch)
8) Project support or maintenance (Maintenance Phase)

For example, construct a building, implement a new computer system, or build a website. Project management includes developing a project scope, which includes defining project goals and objectives, developing out a project plan, specifying tasks or how goals will be achieved, what resources are need, and associating budgets and timelines for completion.

It also includes implementing the project plan, along with careful controls to stay within scope of the project, or on the "critical path. A project manager ensures the plan is being managed according to plan, objectives, and scope.

What does a project manager do

A successful Project Manager must simultaneously manage the basic elements of a project. No matter what industry you are in, there are really four basic project elements. These elements are:
1) TIME
2) MONEY
3) RESOURCES
4) SCOPE

All these elements are interrelated, and each must be managed together if the project is to be a success.

Resources:
People, equipment, material

Time:
Task durations, dependencies, critical path

Money:
Costs, contingencies, profit

Scope:
Project size, goals, requirements.

Welcome to Project Management

Welcome to the project management source blog. The purpose of this blog is to provide a reference source for project managers or people who would like to become project managers. I have been a project manager in the advertising / technical industry for over 7 years now, and I have learned mostly from trial and error. I would like to help project managers better understand the roles of the job, the skill-sets needed for the job, the education available, and tips and advice for becoming better more productive project managers. I hope that you find the tools, advice, and tips here helpful.

Thanks,

Brad