Project Management According to Different

Project Management

According to different theoreticians, within any organization, the projects evolve determined to several constraints. The constraints generally include the group of people working on the respective project (only a limited amount of human resource can be allocated for a certain project, given the fact that others will be working on other projects in the company), the time allocated for the project (no project can go on indefinitely and the project will need to be delivered to the client at some point, hence the temporal constraints) and money (projects generally have budgetary constraints).

This brief description of the constraints that often appear in the lifetime of a project emphasizes the importance of project management. Indeed, project management has everything to do with the inclusion of the four functions of management into the completion of a project. Planning, organizing, directing and controlling are the essential phases in project management that determine whether the project will be completed on time and on budget. Let's have a look at how each of these functions of management plays a role in project management, each showing in part why project management is important.

First of all, the planning function of management will help determine, within the project management process, the elaborate division of the different project phases throughout the lifetime of the project. In other words, the planning function will help tackle the human resources, temporal and budgetary constraints by determining the way that the different phases of the project will be split within the timeframe of the project, how the budget and people will be allocated over the same period of time, all to determine the delivery on time and on budget of the project. Additionally, at any point in the future, the initial planning can be used as reference to the state of the project at that particular time.

In the software industry, the planning phase of project management is just as important. Upon receiving the specifications from the client, the programming team decides on the way that the modules will be developed, but, just as important, the way that each member of the team will work on the different parts of the final application. A tool such as Microsoft Project will help create a visual image of the different parts of the application, the way one part determines the beginning of development on another, how many resources are needed at each stage of the project development phase etc. This is all project planning, essential in determining in the end that the software application can be delivered according to the assumed constraints.

The organizing part is probably the vastest of all the functions of management previously mentioned. It includes different parts of the other functions of management as well, such as resource allocation. As previously shown, resource allocation is important because it ensures the project does not go over the fixed thresholds of time and money. Organizing is equivalent to making sure that these resources are best split between the different parts of the project. However, it is even more than that: it provides the capacity to be able to react if changes occur during the project development and to make the right reallocation decision that will not compromise the project.

In software project management, organizing is often an activity that occurs not only during the planning phase, but on a day-to-day basis, with the project manager reacting to changes along the way. Usually, this may happen when the client changes some of his initial requirements and part of the modules need to be changed. In these cases, the resource allocation mechanism is a fundamental instrument of the organizing function.

The directing and control functions of management somehow are connected when it comes to project management. The reason for this is that the directing function provides the necessary supervision for the tasks to be performed, while the control functions ensures the necessary feedback system, which evaluates the performance results and feeds this back into the directing phase for changes.

In the software industry, the directing and control functions of project management are not only operated from within the organization, but also in relation with the clients, who are usually the entities that provide the best feedback as to the capacity of the application to match exactly their requirements. While the quality assurance and testing processes do take place within the company, meeting with the clients before the final delivery, maybe even after finalizing parts or modules of the application, is also important in the usefulness of project management.

On the other hand, many see project management as "an efficient method of increasing productivity." If we look at the way the four functions of management combine in order to ensure a proper resource allocation, to determine the phases of the project and the concrete way by which these are completed, to direct the individual and to provide a proper control and feedback mechanism, we will indeed have an overall image of why project management can be seen as a way of increasing productivity. The idea of a better organization and planning of the entire work process is an argument in increasing productivity.