This paper provides a structured overview of project management by breaking the process into three core phases: select, manage, and track. Beginning with how companies align projects to strategic objectives, the paper examines the key selection criteria of people, time, and money—including financial tools such as Net Present Value (NPV) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR). It then explores how project portfolios are actively managed over time, covering resource allocation, budget adjustments, and human resource dynamics. Finally, it discusses the tracking phase, in which project managers monitor performance, approve changes, and assess risk throughout a project's lifespan. The paper concludes that project management is an ongoing, dynamic process closely tied to a company's broader strategic goals.
Although desirable, it is quite difficult to open with a dictionary definition of project management, mainly because of the complexity involved in the process — a complexity impossible to cover with a simple two-line definition. It is therefore best to describe the process, highlighting its main characteristics.
A company's strategic perspective may be broadly reduced to two concepts around which everything else revolves: objectives and projects. Any company will begin building its analysis around a series of drivers and objectives for the next few years. These objectives should be limited in number; if a company had fifteen objectives for the coming years, its resources would be too dispersed to fulfill any of them efficiently.
Once the company has defined its goals, it needs to define a portfolio of projects that best serve those goals. These projects will be defined, evaluated, analyzed from a strategic and value-added perspective, and tracked throughout their entire lifespan. While the goals a company sets will generally remain stable for a period of time, individual projects will be under constant supervision; some may be suspended if they have achieved their goal or are not performing as expected. In summary, project management deals with the entire lifespan of a project and everything related to it.
The project management process can be divided into three major phases: select, manage, and track.
The Select phase is perhaps one of the most important, because it sets the foundation for everything that follows. This phase has two steps.
The first step consists of building a broad set of projects that the company believes will serve its strategic objectives. The key question a company should always ask is whether a project has a significant impact on the drivers it has established. This set of projects is typically assembled in a collaborative manner: each department proposes a set of projects significant to that department, and those proposals are then analyzed at the company level. It is natural that some projects significant at the departmental level may prove less so at the company level. Accordingly, a first round of selection occurs when compiling each department's proposals and determining which ones can meaningfully impact the company's strategic drivers.
The second part of the selection phase is perhaps the most challenging, because this is where the final portfolio of projects is established and the company commits to a specific set of projects it will complete in the coming years. Scope and strategic impact are important initial filters, but there are additional elements to consider. As much of the literature on project management notes, there is a need to manage and balance three elements: people, time, and money. After the initial scope-based selection, each of these elements must be examined individually.
People is a critical element, because the quality and quantity of human resources allocated to each project will determine both whether it is completed on time and whether it is completed properly. Project selection must account for human resource availability. There is little point in deciding on one hundred projects that serve the company's strategic interests if there are not enough people to work on them. Each human resource should also be assessed individually. For example, consider several information technology and software projects. Each typically requires a team composed of a project manager, several programmers, and one or two application testers. If there are not enough project managers for all the projects the company wishes to pursue, selecting all of them is impractical, because they will not be completed to a sufficient standard.
Time is equally important. Some projects must be completed by a specific date. If a project cannot realistically be finished by that date, there is no point in allocating resources to it. For example, many European companies undertook projects to ensure a smooth transition to the euro. However, since the euro was introduced in 1999, any project that could not be completed by that deadline was not worth starting.
Money also plays a crucial role in project selection. Cost relative to the company's budget must be considered first. If a project's cost is too high, it cannot reasonably be started. However, there may be cases where a high-cost project is critically important to many of the company's strategic drivers. In such cases, the company must carefully evaluate whether the cost is justified, taking into account additional factors such as the ability to complete the project on time.
"Using NPV and IRR to justify project viability"
"Dynamic resource and budget management over time"
"Performance monitoring, changes, and risk assessment"
A swift and brief definition of project management cannot be applied. However, there are a series of attributes and characteristics that make project management recognizable.
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