Joseph Phillips: Project Management and the Big Picture

Chances are projects within your organization are of the same nature. What I mean by that is that you and your fellow project managers are probably managing projects that have something in common: you are all managing IT projects, managing health care projects, construction projects, and so on. The industry that you work in is the application area and your projects happen within that application area.

Your projects likely also have something else in common – they exist to support something more than just the project. Your projects exist to help your organization, your company, your community, increase revenue, decrease costs, improve a condition, or support an idea or service. Projects, for all intensive purposes, serve some greater good.

When we consider projects and the big picture the point to make clear is this: projects aren’t the big picture – they’re part of the picture itself. Projects exist within some entity and that entity exists within some application area. Projects are part of the moving mechanism in a company, a culture, or an organization.

Defining a Project

A project is a temporary undertaking to create something unique – think of a new product, a new service, or even a new condition in your organization. Two interesting words in that last sentence when it comes to projects: temporary and unique. Temporary, of course, means that it won’t last forever. The reason I’m stressing temporary is that’s one of the first realizations of a project versus an operation. Consider the manufacturing of a new car – that’s, for all practical purposes, an on-going operation. The design and creation of the car to be manufactured, however, is a project. It has a clear beginning and a clear ending. Projects do not last forever (they may feel that they do), but have a definite beginning and a definite end.

The second word is unique. A project creates something that has never, ever been created before. You say, “Slow down there, professor. I’ve managed lots of projects that have created the same thing over and over.” That’s probably true to some extent: a construction company may build the same model home over and over. An IT consulting firm may install the same piece of software over and over. And even a cake designer may create the same type of cake over and over. The point is every one of those homes, software installs, and yummy cakes are unique. Consider the elevation, home owners, risks, market conditions, and more unique conditions for those new homes. Consider all the different configurations of software and hardware for the IT gurus. When it comes to cakes, well, the recipe may be Old Aunt Sarah’s Coconut Raspberry Surprise, but the customers, conditions, and desire for the cake are going to be slightly different each and every time.

My point here is that a project is not an operation. Projects are not repeatable events like manufacturing, providing a service like cable television, or mowing your lawn. Projects are special. If you’re a project manager I guess that makes you special, too.

Defining Project Management

So if a project is a short-term endeavor to create something then project management must be, of course, the management of that endeavor. Yep. Project management is the management of the processes, activities, and knowledge areas within that endeavor. I like to say that managing a project is not unlike managing your own company.

Project management begins with an idea – and usually not the project manager’s idea – of something that needs to be done, created, removed, or invented. The idea itself usually comes from a stakeholder. You might know your stakeholders as management, customers, or end users. A stakeholder is simply a person that has a vested interest in the outcome of your project. Technically speaking, the idea is really about the product that your project will be creating. Imagine that you’re a project manager for a software development company, and I have a wonderful idea for a new piece of software that I want your company to create for me.

I don’t come to you with all the steps and activities to create the new piece of software, do I? Rather I come to you with my vision of the software product. I describe to you all the parts of the software, how my companies will be using the program, and all the features and functions of the software that I’ll want to see. I am describing to you the product scope. The product scope is all about features and functions; it’s all the things my software will include and that I expect you to create for me. The product is the primary deliverable of your project.

Real World Note: Features and functions are key to developing the requirements of the product scope. These two words are attached to a commonly misused term in project management: configuration management. Configuration management is managing, documenting, and controlling the features and functions of the product as the product is being created within project management.

Project management centers on five activities:

• Establishing the acceptance requirements for the project deliverables
• Determining clear and achievable project objectives
• Managing the time, cost, and scope of the project
• Managing the project stakeholders
• Communicating with the project stakeholders

These five activities are, no doubt, iterative in nature. You’ll be constantly communicating with customers, functional managers, project team members, vendors and more as your project moves toward completion. Notice how the first three of these activities are done very early in the project? You first have to know and document what the heck the stakeholders expect in order to give it to them. I’ll discuss more about these activities as we move through the remaining sections.

The other two activities, managing the stakeholders and communicating with the stakeholders happens throughout the entire project. Can you guess when you’re done communicating with and managing stakeholders? If you said when the project is complete go get yourself a scoop of ice cream – absolutely correct. These are three of the many iterative activities throughout your project (um, the stakeholder management and communications are iterative activities, not getting ice cream.)

Related posts:

1. Dave Prior: The Art of War and Project Management 2
2. Dr. Paul D. Giammalvo: Open Source Trends and the Future of the Project Management Body of Knowledge……
3. Ramesh Sreedhar, PMP: The need to follow the Project Management Processes