What Is Exactly Project Management And Why Is It Important?

The secret to delivering any product or service at the right time is strict management during its production. And the one who pulls every string of the project in harmony is called the project manager. Their ability to deliver projects on schedule, on budget, aligning business objectives gain the company an edge in the cut-throat competition.

Project managers handle even complex projects by fusing organizational skills, analytical mindset, and agile interpersonal experiences. However, that’s not all. If you cannot understand the project well enough, you won’t be able to plan and execute it. So how should you perceive the “project,” and what are the project management basics? Let’s dig out.

What is a project?

The Project Management Institute interprets a “project” as “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result.”

• “Temporary” refers to a defined period of time of the project with a beginning and end. Meaning, it’s a must for every project to include a timeline, scope, and resources.
• “Creating a unique product, service, or result ‘’ should be the purpose of a project. Meaning, the project is to accomplish a particular goal that may require contribution from people you don’t usually work together with.

Next to project definition, you need to know the basics of the project for effective production planning and execution. The components each project includes are:

Goal: What are you trying to accomplish with the project?

Timeline: When are you trying to accomplish it?

Budget: How much budget would it require to achieve?

Stakeholders: Who are the vital players who have an interest in this project?

Project manager: Who will be responsible for making sure everything that needs to be completed gets completed?

But, Why is project management critical?

Project management is crucial to:

• Have a more formalized project planning and execution process at your disposal;
• Ensure the project development stick to the predefined budgets, schedules, and scope guidelines;
• Resolve project roadblocks and escalate issues earlier and faster;
• Identify and eliminate projects that do not have relevant business value;
• Make your outcome more efficient;
• Improve collaboration across and within teams;
• Foresee and plan solutions for potential risks;

Now, we will see how a project manager should set about the project management cycle step-by-step.

Stages of Project Management

We can break the project management process into five chunks:

Initiating: During initiation, your goal is to define the project and understand its primary purpose.

Planning: Once you and the team understand the project, it’s time to develop a roadmap for every team member to follow.

Executing & Monitoring: By now, your project team will be onboard with set deliverables. And the role of the project manager will be to monitor and measure every project performance, ensuring positive progress.

Closing: You close the project when all set milestones are accomplished, and you transfer the project to another team to maintain further.

Okay, so far, you understand what project and project management is and the steps of project management. But do you know there are many methodologies you can acquire according to your project for streamlining the production? Let me introduce you to them:

Project Management Methodologies

• Agile Project Management:

It enables you to adapt to the client’s changing needs. You can iterate the process quickly and efficiently while still meeting project deadlines. It prioritizes six deliverables: a product vision statement, a product roadmap, a product backlog, a release plan, a Sprint backlog, and an increment backlog.

Suitable for: Projects involving complexity, high adaptability, repeated feedback (iterative), team participation.

• Scrum Project Management:

It allows you to keep a project going while also enhancing team communication. In comparison to other methods, Scrum is exceptionally rapid and cost-effective. By splitting the project into smaller portions, you can iterate the process more frequently.

Suitable for: A project involving less than seven team members, high flexibility, and continuous quality checks.

• Kanban Project Management

By visualizing the project and utilizing feedback loops, it produces high-quality results. It focuses on task division in order to streamline and manage them.

Suitable for: A project involving smaller teams, higher flexibility, task prioritization, project visualization, and streamlined tasks.

• Waterfall Project Management:

It follows a step-by-step method flow, yet it is rigid. The waterfall technique focuses on documentation and employs logic to process the system.

Suitable for: A project of considerable size involving complexity, strict deadlines, and predictability.

• Lean Project Management:

Lean strictly adheres to a number of principles and aims to eliminate all variations in the system. In this way, it reduces “waste” in the system, increasing the efficiency of the project.

Suitable for: Projects that need to deliver higher quality and want control over the system. Projects interested in changing the flow of the system

• Six Sigma Project Management:

Originally introduced by Motorola, Six Sigma is a quality-improvement project management approach. The use of statistics and empirical theories assists in mitigating errors. The Six Sigma philosophy commits to streamlining the organization’s processes and improving its performance.

Suitable for: Projects that are large in size, focus on customer retention, streamlined operations, and upgrade quality.

• PRINCE2 (Project In Controlled Environments) Project Management:

The PRINCE2 model has been utilized by private organizations to break down tasks into smaller units.

Suitable for: Projects that involve flexibility and tasks with utmost clarity. Projects that require stakeholder involvement also prefer PRINCE2 Project management.

That’s all in the project management introductory guide. If you wish and you must know more about project management and the roles of project managers, you had better head to Project Management & Delivery Milestone in App Development. There you will find ideas to set project milestones, tools to manage projects efficiently, and many valuable tips, all bundled up in one guide. So, get there fast!