Project management is the art of managing the project and its deliverables with a view to produce finished products or service. There are many ways in which a project can be carried out and the way in which it is executed is project management.
Project management includes: identifying requirements, establishing clear and achievable objectives, balancing the competing demands from the different stakeholders and ensuring that a commonality of purpose is achieved. It is clear that unless there is a structured and scientific approach to the practice of management, organizations would find themselves adrift in the Ocean called organizational development and hence would be unable to meet the myriad challenges that the modern era throws at them. Hence, the importance of project management to organizations cannot be emphasized more and the succeeding paragraphs provide some reasons why organizations must take the practice of project management seriously.
Without a scientific approach to the task of managing the projects and achieving objectives, it would be very difficult for the organizations to successfully execute the projects within the constraints of time, scope and quality and deliver the required result. In other words, there has to be a framework and a defined way of doing things to ensure that there is a structure to the art of project management.
Thus, project management is about creating structure and managing the project commitments and the delivery of agreed upon results. By using the methods of project management as described in the PMBOK and allied technical journals, organizations can seek to achieve control over the project environment and ensure that the project deliverables are being managed. Managers face what is known as the “triple constraintâ€. This is the competing demands of time, scope and quality upon the project manager’s list of things to do and how well the project manager manages these constraints goes a long way in determining the success of the project. Without the use of Project Management, managers and organizations would find themselves facing an unpredictable and chaotic environment over which they have little control. Thus, Project Management is both necessary and essential to the success of the project.
Project Management is too big an area to be covered in a few pages and the attempt is to provide concise and lucid definitions of the various terms and terminologies associated with a project. It is important to note that project management provides a framework within which subsequent actions by the organization can be taken and in this way, it is essential for organizations to adopt the framework provided by the practice of project management.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Project Management and the practice of the same have become indispensable to the modern day project manager and they form the basis of much of what is achieved during the course of a project. Thus, the idea of a project being managed professionally lends itself to the concepts and processes laid out for the practitioners of the art of Project Management.
