PROJECT MANAGEMENT: PHASES, OBJECTIVES AND EXAMPLES - DUDAS - 2024

The project management is to meet the exercise of the initiation, planning, execution, control and closure of the work of a team to satisfy specific reasons for success and achieving specific goals within the prescribed time. Therefore, it is the application of skills, techniques, knowledge and tools to program activities that satisfy the requirements of a project.

A project is transitional work designed to generate a unique result, service, or product, with a defined beginning and end, undertaken to achieve notable objectives and goals, generally to achieve added value or beneficial change.

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The temporal quality of projects is at variance with routine business operations, which are simple iterative, semi-permanent or permanent activities to produce services or products.

Not having a process to manage projects can result in wasted time, lost money, and poor performance.

Powerful tool

Project management is a powerful business tool that can offer many benefits to companies of all sizes. Provides repeatable processes, guidelines, and techniques to help manage the people and work involved in projects.

It can increase your chances of success and helps deliver projects consistently, efficiently, on time, and on budget.

By implementing basic project management strategies, desired goals will be achieved and those goals will be achieved within a specified time and cost range.

The bottom line is that everyone wins, which could therefore be the best benefit of all for project management.

Phases

Initiation

The initiation phase determines the nature and scope of the project. You need to understand the business environment and also ensure that the necessary controls are built into the project.

The project initiation documents are a series of briefs that are used to create regulations for the duration of the project. These include:

- Project proposal: idea behind the project, general objective, duration.

- Scope of the project: direction and monitoring of the project.

- Breakdown of work structure: a scale of the work to be done, up to daily tasks.

- Responsibility allocation matrix: roles and responsibilities aligned with the results.

- Analysis of business needs and requirements against measurable objectives.

- Review of current operations.

- Project letter, including costs, tasks, deliverables and schedules.

Planning

The main objective is to properly plan time, costs and resources to estimate the work required and thus effectively manage risk during project execution. It consists of determining the methodology to follow for project management.

- Identify the deliverables and create the breakdown structures of the work.

- Identify the activities necessary to complete these deliverables and thus connect those activities with a logical sequence.

- Estimate the resource requirement for the activities.

- Estimate the time and cost of the activities.

- Development of the schedule and budget.

- Risk planning.

- Obtain formal approval to start work.

Execution

During execution, you must know what are the planned deadlines to be executed. The execution phase ensures that the deliverables of the project management plan are done accordingly.

This phase involves the proper allocation, coordination and management of human resources and any other resources, such as materials and budgets. The result of this phase is the project deliverables.

Project documentation

To maintain budget, scope, effectiveness, and also pace, a project must have physical documents related to each specific task.

With the correct documentation, it is easy to see whether or not the requirements of a project are being met. The documentation provides information on what has already been completed for that project.

Done right, documentation can be the backbone of a project's success.

Monitoring and control

It consists of the processes that are carried out to observe the execution of the project, so that potential problems can be identified in a timely manner and corrective measures can be taken when necessary, to control the execution of the project.

Project performance is observed and measured to identify variations in the project management plan.

It also provides feedback between the different phases of the project, in order to implement preventive or corrective actions to comply with the project management plan.

Closing

It contains the formal completion of the project and its acceptance. Administrative activities include documentation of lessons learned. It consists of finalizing all the activities of the entire set of processes to formally close the project.

Post-execution review is also included in this phase. This is a vital phase for the project team to learn from experiences and apply it to future projects.

You should look at the things that worked well in the project and analyze the things that did not work to generate lessons learned.

goals

The goal of project management is to complete a comprehensive project that meets the client's objectives.

Successfully develop the project phases

A project, regardless of its size, generally involves five distinctive phases of equal importance: Initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and control, closure.

The smooth and uninterrupted development and execution of all the above phases guarantee the success of a project.

Communicate efficiently

It should always be kept in mind that the success or failure of a project depends largely on teamwork. Therefore, the key to success is always in collaboration.

To this end, establishing good communication is of great importance. On the one hand, the information must be articulated clearly and completely, so that everyone understands it fully. On the other hand, you must have the ability to listen and receive constructive feedback.

Achieve the main objective of the project

The main objective of the project must be completed within the estimated time, with the expected quality and within the considered budget.

Optimizing the necessary inputs assigned and their application to meet the predefined objectives of the project is a matter where there is always room for improvement.

All processes and procedures can be reformed and updated to improve the sustainability of a project and also to guide the team through the process of strategic change.

Produce a project that follows the client's objectives

This could mean that the client's vision needs to be addressed and reformed, or negotiated with them in relation to the project objectives, to turn them into achievable goals.

Meeting customer expectations and keeping them happy not only leads to successful collaboration, which can help eliminate surprises during project execution, but also ensures future sustainability.

Benefits

The main advantage of project management is that it helps you manage projects effectively. This allows for faster problem solving.

Greater efficiency in the provision of services

Project management provides a roadmap that is easily followed and leads to project completion. After you know where to avoid potholes, it stands to reason that you are going to work smarter and more efficiently.

Customer satisfaction

As long as a project is completed on time and under budget, the client leaves happy. And a happy customer is someone who will be seen again.

Intelligent project management provides the tools that allow this client / manager relationship to continue.

Greater effectiveness in the provision of services

The same strategies that made it possible to successfully complete one project will also serve many other projects.

Improves growth and development within the team

Positive results not only build respect, they often inspire the project team to continue looking for ways to perform more efficiently.

Increased flexibility

Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of project management is that it allows flexibility. A secure project management allows you to draw the strategy you want to carry out so that the project is completed.

However, the beauty of such an organization is that if a smarter path to take is discovered, it can be taken. For many small and medium-sized businesses, this alone is worth the price of admission.

Increased risk assessment

When all the players are lined up and the strategy is in place, they will jump the potential risks to slap.

Project management provides a red flag at the right time - before you start working on project completion.

Examples

American Airlines

The merger of American Airlines with US Airways created an overlap in technology and programs. They knew spreadsheets weren't enough to manage complex projects and resources.

To gain visibility into the broader divisional and global priorities, they began to use project management for personnel entry, resource management, and capacity planning.

As a result, the airline went from capitalizing on its information technology work from 10% to 20%. This equates to a net positive impact of several million dollars on your balance sheet.

Now, they have access to better and more reliable data to make critical decisions about projects and resources.

Royal Bank

The Royal Bank of Scotland needed to implement consistent and reliable data to inform financial and resource decisions. Therefore, they chose project management to drive this consistency. So they retired 35 legacy systems, more than 50 user-developed tools, and hundreds of spreadsheets.

With data in different formats and hundreds of projects managed by different systems, they wanted to control their data to see their total client base more clearly.

In twelve months they were able to fulfill their business case and achieve a return on investment. Along the way, they have improved transparency and reduced costs at each business unit.

References

1. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (2019). Project management. Taken from: en.wikipedia.org.
2. Project Management Institute (2019). What is Project Management? Taken from: pmi.org.
3. Clarizen (2018). What Are the Objectives of Project Management? Taken from: clarizen.com.
4. NI Business (2019). Advantages of project management. Taken from: nibusinessinfo.co.uk.
5. Gary Picariello (2019). The Top 10 Benefits of Project Management. Bright Hub Project Management. Taken from: brighthubpm.com.
6. Leyna O'Quinn (2018). 5 Real-World Successful Project Management Examples. Planview Blog. Taken from: blog.planview.com.