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Relevance in project management
The role of project management in achieving project success
Relevance in project management
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Project Management: Art to the Rescue!
"Is project management more of a science or more of an art form?"
Introduction
Today’s business executives are asking their managers and employees “to do more… with less”. Fewer Project Managers are leading more projects with poor results, the latest Standish Group – Chaos Report shows that only 28% of IT projects succeed. Many believe that the key to Project success in not applying technical management principles, but rather, more artful soft skills such as communication and creativity. (Belzer, 2004).
This case study will present and discuss why the application of soft skills will help today’s stressed-out Project Managers implement successful projects. Not only must projects be deployed on time and within budget, they must ultimately bring value to the stakeholder. Often times relating this information to the project sponsor requires creativity rather than a montage of colorful Gantt charts and graphs.
The truly gifted Project Managers are those that can apply the systematic hard skills in an artful manner by using soft skills. To that end, some systematic or science related management skills will be discussed, along with the soft skills and how they are used together to successfully manage projects.
Scientific Approach
Systematic or “hard” skills such as Gantt Charting or diagramming are just some of the tools Project Managers use to track project activities. While they are important to project success they are not the end all. Successful Project Leaders know the winning formula for combining hard skills with soft skills. A thorough understanding of the technical system to be deployed allows project leaders to break the project down into many smaller tasks. Assign...
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...also qualities of successful managers. Good leaders apply artistic traits to scientific tools in order to effectively manage complex projects.
Bibliography:
Kate Belzer (2004) Project Management: Still More Art than Science
Andrew D. Brown, Matthew R. Jones (1998) Doomed to failure: narratives of inevitability and conspiracy in a failed IS project. Organization Studies, Winter.
Michael Greer (1999) 14 Key Principles for PM Success. Chapter 6: Planning and Managing Human Performance Technology Projects, "Handbook of Human Performance Technology, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass
Craig Schiff (January, 2004) Maximize Business Performance: Getting Started: The BPM Project Life Cycle
Paul Worthington (2001) Case Study – Developing Project Management Skills in Managing Death March Projects. Working paper, School of Business, Curtin University, Perth, AU
Crawford (2000) suggests that project leadership is the highest ranking category among project management competence factors. Project management leadership style affects overall project performance. Recent research supports the idea that successful projects are led by individuals who possess not only a blend of technical and management knowledge, but also leadership skills that are internally compatible with the motivation of the project team (Slevin and Pinto, 1988; Turner et al., 1998). Zimmerer and Yasin (1998) found that positive leadership contributed almost 76% to the success of projects. Negative or poor leadership contributed 67% to the failure of projects. Project leaders need both, relationships and task oriented leadership styles, to cope with the challenges within different phases of project (Slevin and Pinto, 1991). In projects, project leaders must lead their teams towards completing defined goals with in a fixed time scale. Verma (1997) states “Achieving the goal or final aim is the ultimate test of leadership”. Goals and tasks are achieved through people thus making people an important resource for
The project management is a skill to apply the functions correctly which measures the outcome of the project, the more the skill the nice the outcome will be. This comes through experience and having a proper knowledge of some of the functions like
Frame, J.D., Managing Projects in Organizations: How to Make the Best use of Time, Techniques and People, third ed., San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,112-117, 2003.
Project management is known as the discipline of planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling resources to achieve specific goals. In the diagram to the left in the picture you can see that as a project manager you are the center of either a great accomplishment or a major failure. Some of the major factors to being a successful project manager would be a person that is a great manage several projects or responsibilities and scope issues on an every day basis. If you have a pr...
Jugdev, K. (2012). Learning from Lessons Learned: Project Management Research Program. American Journal of Economics and Business Administration , 4(1), 13-22.
Gray, C., Larson, E. (2008). Project Management: The managerial Process. New York, NY: The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.
Patanakul, P., & Milosevic, D. Z. (2010). They are business leaders at Spotlight Corporation. In D. Z. Milosevic, P. Patanakul, & S. Srivannaboon, (Eds.), Case studies in project, program, and organizational project management (pp.409-416), Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley &
In today's business it is in the best interest of companies to have project managers. Common sense isn't always easily accomplished. Anyone who's ever worked on a project in a technical setting knows this. Indeed, much of working with others consists of solving unexpected problems and learning from mistakes along the way. Knowing this and having the proper tools a project manager will be able to manage and complete the most intense project out there.
A. Introduction The scope of this report is to provide project managers with valuable insights on the author’s own philosophical view on project management, focusing on the organization’s internal & external environment and circumstances affecting the project’s success e.g. The project management structure, forming virtual teams, and the organization’s stakeholders, etc. Laufer et al. (2015) had also emphasized the importance of long-term planning in dealing with these unforeseen events, which raises the point that project managers must be well-equipped with the proper knowledge and tools to appropriately handle such situations. The success of a project is undeniably crucial to an organization because businesses are able to meet the customers’ demands, leading to upholding of reputation and business partnership.
Project management is a discipline based on careful planning, organization, motivation and control of resources to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria. Since every project is unique in nature, a project manager must learn to adapt and identify key areas to drive success. Thus, as a learning initiative, we were given a project to manage through a simulation program named Sim4Project. The emphasis of this simulation was on learning-by-doing, just like in a real-life project. Sim4Project provided a good mix of theoretical knowledge as well as hands-on experience. Professor Leonie gave feedbacks at the end of each period to ensure we were incorporating the project management principles learned in the classroom.
Project management is said to be completed within time when it completed within the “triple constraints”: cost, time and quality. And in a lot of causes, one them is sacrificed so as to meet the other two. Project managers prioritize which ones are the most important.
Since first taking the quiz “How Good Are Your Project Management Skills?” until now, can you identify areas of growth or knowledge regarding project management specifically, or leadership in general? Do you find yourself giving more consideration to particular areas, principles, or practices (e.g. scheduling, scope management, communication styles, etc.)?
In the globalized economy, Successful project managers are in much demand across many industries. Organizations strongly need experienced project managers to lead their staff to accomplish their business goals and deliver successful projects. In an increasingly complex environment, project managers need to turn into many roles and have all kinds of responsibilities at each level of management within an organization. Good project managers are not born. They need to be trained. They develop their skills through study, practise and experience. They become better project managers after they finish a successful project each time. They learn new techniques and apply them on their projects. They learn their lessons from failed projects and then improve to be better project managers in the future.
Over the course of my professional life, I have become increasingly involved in project management roles. Doing so has made me aware of the many varied challenges that can face projects and the project managers who are charged with bringing them through to completion. The success or failure of projects, in whatever economic, political or social field, rests not just on the quality of the project’s goals, but also on the abilities of those involved in the project – and above all those who are managing it – to bring it to successful completion. To do this, project managers need to be equipped with a very wide range of skills, many of which are unrelated to the type of project itself. So, for example, a project manager of an engineering project must not only have engineering
When planning a new project, how the project will be managed is one of the most important factors. The importance of a managers will determine the success of the project. The success of the project will be determined by how well it is managed. Project management is referred to as the discipline that entails the processes of carefully planning, organizing, controlling, and motivating the organization resources so as to foster and facilitate the achievement of specific established and desired goals and meet the specific criteria of success required in the organization (Larson, 2014). Over the course of this paper I will be discussing and analyzing the importance of project management.