Project Management What is the difference between leadership and management? How do these two terms relate to a project manager?

Leadership defines the vision and mission for a project or business, and then orchestrates the many departments and divisions together for their fulfillment. A strong project leader will also seek ot unify diverse teams by concentrating on making the wide range of talents all combine for greater accomplishment than one person or team alone could attain. In short, a leader know how to use a strong, compelling vision and mission to unify diverse teams and people to a common, challenging goal or objective.

While a leader defines a vision or mission for a business, a manager is given the responsibility of making sure all departments, functional areas of the company and external stakeholders are all orchestrated to a common set of performance metrics. Managers are given the task of ensuring conformity to performance requirements in addition to preservation of the status quo. All of these functional areas are often combined into the four vital functions of planning, organizing, leading and controlling.

In the case of a project manager, they must combine both leadership and managerial skill sets. The leadership aspects of project management include concentrating on defining a compelling vision and mission, and through the use of communication and collaboration techniques, creating shared ownership throughout the teams. The project manager must also hold people and teams accountable for their performance over time as well, fulfilling the functional...

In short, the project manager must concentrate on balancing both their leadership and managerial skills to ensure a high level of project performance, and continual attainment of project tasks. The best project managers have an innate strength at Emotional Intelligence (EI) that guides their situational assessments and judgment over time.
2. Describe the concept of a systems approach.

The basis of the systems approach to project management states that the many aspects, functional areas, and integration processes must all be integrated together to create a unified, holistic project. The systems approach to project management also centers on the need for making the many disparate systems, processes and programs a complex project relies on stay synchronized to a common goal or objective as well.

3. What is a systems development life cycle? What are some of the predictive models associated with the systems development life cycle?

By definition the systems development lifecycle (SDLC) is comprised of a series of components that together form a framework that describes the phases of software development, testing, release and support. There are many variations of the SDLC framework including the spiral model, waterfall model, incremental build model, prototyping and Rapid Application Development (RAD) models. The SDLC model is predicated on and relies heavily on what is called the predictive life cycle assumptions and concepts of its many variations mentioned. The predictive life cycle specifically…