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Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, securing, and managing resources to achieve specific goals. A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or deliverables), undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value. The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast with business as usual (or operations), which are repetitive, permanent, or semi-permanent functional activities to produce products or services. In practice, the management of these two systems is often quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and management strategies.
The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honoring the preconceived constraints. Typical constraints are scope, time, and budget. The secondary—and more ambitious—challenge is to optimize the allocation of necessary inputs and integrate them to meet pre-defined objectives.
Until 1900 civil engineering projects were generally managed by creative architects, engineers, and master builders themselves, for example Vitruvius (first century BC), Christopher Wren (1632–1723), Thomas Telford (1757–1834) and Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859). It was in the 1950s that organizations started to systematically apply project management tools and techniques to complex engineering projects.
The Project Management Institute (PMI) is a not-for-profit professional organization for the project management profession with the purpose of advancing project management.
The Project Management Institute (PMI) offers a range of services to the Project Management profession such as the development of standards, research, education, publication, networking-opportunities in local chapters, hosting conferences and training seminars, and maintaining multiple credentials in project management. These credentials are:
Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM)
Project Management Professional (PMP)
PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)
PMI Scheduling Professional (PMI-SP)
PMI Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP)
Program Management Professional (PgMP)
In addition to career development credentials, PMI offers one certification:
Organizational Project Management Maturity Model Certified Consultant (OPM3-CC)
PMI has recruited volunteers to create industry standards, such as "A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge", which has been recognized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
Launched in 1984, PMI's first certification was the PMP. Around 370,000 people now hold the PMP certification. In 2007, it earned the ANSI/ISO/IEC 17024 accreditation from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Credential holders do not have to be members of PMI.
In the software industry, program management is an aspect of software product management.
Program management or programme management is the process of managing several related projects, often with the intention of improving an organization's performance. In practice and in its aims it is often closely related to systems engineering and industrial engineering.
The Program Manager has oversight of the purpose and status of all projects in a Program and can use this oversight to support project-level activity to ensure the overall program goals are likely to be met, possibly by providing a decision-making capacity that cannot be achieved at project level or by providing the Project Manager with a program perspective when required, or as a sounding board for ideas and approaches to solving project issues that have program impacts. Typically in a program there is a need to identify and manage cross-project dependencies and often the PMO (Program or Project Management Office) may not have sufficient insight of the risk, issues, requirements, design or solution to be able to usefully manage these. The Program manager may be well placed to provide this insight by actively seeking out such information from the Project Managers although in large and/or complex projects, a specific role may be required. However this insight arises, the Program Manager needs this in order to be comfortable that the overall program goals are achievable.
There are two different views of how programmes differ from projects.
The Program (or Project) Evaluation and Review Technique, commonly abbreviated PERT, is a statistical tool, used in project management, that is designed to analyze and represent the tasks involved in completing a given project. First developed by the United States Navy in the 1950s, it is commonly used in conjunction with the critical path method or CPM.
PERT is a method to analyze the involved tasks in completing a given project, especially the time needed to complete each task, and to identify the minimum time needed to complete the total project.
PERT was developed primarily to simplify the planning and scheduling of large and complex projects. It was developed for the U.S. Navy Special Projects Office in 1957 to support the U.S. Navy's Polaris nuclear submarine project. It was able to incorporate uncertainty by making it possible to schedule a project while not knowing precisely the details and durations of all the activities. It is more of an event-oriented technique rather than start- and completion-oriented, and is used more in projects where time, rather than cost, is the major factor. It is applied to very large-scale, one-time, complex, non-routine infrastructure and Research and Development projects. An example of this was for the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble which applied PERT from 1965 until the opening of the 1968 Games.
This project model was the first of its kind, a revival for scientific management, founded by Frederick Taylor (Taylorism) and later refined by Henry Ford (Fordism).
PRojects IN Controlled Environments 2 (PRINCE2) is a structured project management method endorsed by the UK government as the project management standard for public projects. The methodology encompasses the management, control and organisation of a project. PRINCE2 is also used to refer to the training and accreditation of authorised practitioners of the methodology who must undertake accredited qualifications to obtain certification.
PRINCE2 is derived from an earlier method called PROMPTII and from PRINCE project management method, which was initially developed in 1989 by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) as a UK Government standard for information systems (IT) project management; however, it soon became regularly applied outside the purely IT environment. PRINCE2 was released in 1996 as a generic project management method. PRINCE2 has become increasingly popular and is now a de facto standard for project management in the UK.
Since 2006, the method has been revised and launched as "PRINCE2:2009 Refresh" in 2009. The name "PRINCE2" (instead of "PRINCE3" or similar) is kept to indicate that the method remains faithful to its principles. Nevertheless, it is a fundamental revision of the method from 1996 to adapt it to the changed business environment, to make the method simpler and "lighter", to address current weaknesses or misunderstandings, and to better integrate it with other OGC methods (ITIL, P3O, P3M3, MSP, M_o_R etc.).
A work breakdown structure (WBS), in project management and systems engineering, is a deliverable oriented decomposition of a project into smaller components. It defines and groups a project's discrete work elements in a way that helps organize and define the total work scope of the project.
A work breakdown structure element may be a product, data, a service, or any combination. A WBS also provides the necessary framework for detailed cost estimating and control along with providing guidance for schedule development and control.
The work breakdown structure is a tree structure, which shows a subdivision of effort required to achieve an objective; for example a program, project, and contract. In a project or contract, the WBS is developed by starting with the end objective and successively subdividing it into manageable components in terms of size, duration, and responsibility (e.g., systems, subsystems, components, tasks, subtasks, and work packages) which include all steps necessary to achieve the objective.
The work breakdown structure provides a common framework for the natural development of the overall planning and control of a contract and is the basis for dividing work into definable increments from which the statement of work can be developed and technical, schedule, cost, and labor hour reporting can be established.
A work breakdown structure permits summing of subordinate costs for tasks, materials, etc., into their successively higher level “parent” tasks, materials, etc.
A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) is a book which presents a set of standard terminology and guidelines for project management. The Fourth Edition (2008) was recognized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as an American National Standard (ANSI/PMI 99-001-2008) and by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — IEEE 1490-2011.
A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) was first published by the Project Management Institute (PMI) as a white paper in 1983 in an attempt to document and standardize generally accepted project management information and practices. The first edition was published in 1996 followed by the second edition in 2000.
In 2004, the PMBOK Guide — Third Edition was published with major changes from the previous editions. The latest English-language PMBOK Guide — Fourth Edition was released on December 31, 2008.
Work on the Fifth Edition is in development. On February 17 2012 an Exposure Draft of the PMBOK Guide Fifth Edition was made available for review and comment. The final version is expected to be published in 2012/2013..
The PMBOK Guide is process-based, meaning it describes work as being accomplished by processes. This approach is consistent with other management standards such as ISO 9000 and the Software Engineering Institute's CMMI. Processes overlap and interact throughout a project or its various phases.
Critical chain project management (CCPM) is a method of planning and managing projects that puts the main emphasis on the resources required to execute project tasks. It was developed by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. This is in contrast to the more traditional critical path and PERT methods, which emphasize task order and rigid scheduling. A Critical Chain project network will tend to keep the resources levelly loaded, but will require them to be flexible in their start times and to quickly switch between tasks and task chains to keep the whole project on schedule.
Critical chain project management is based on methods and algorithms derived from Theory of Constraints. The idea of CCPM was introduced in 1997 in Eliyahu M. Goldratt's book, Critical Chain. Application of CCPM has been credited with achieving projects 10% to 50% faster and/or cheaper than the traditional methods (i.e. CPM, PERT, Gantt, etc.) developed from 1910 to 1950s.
From numerous studies by Standish Group and others as of 1998 for traditional project management methods, only 44% of projects typically finish on time, projects usually complete at 222% of the duration originally planned, 189% of the original budgeted cost, 70% of projects fall short of their planned scope (technical content delivered), and 30% are cancelled before completion.
These traditional statistics are mostly avoided through CCPM. Typically, CCPM case studies report 95% on-time and on-budget completion when CCPM is applied correctly.
A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart, developed by Henry Gantt, that illustrates a project schedule. Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project. Terminal elements and summary elements comprise the work breakdown structure of the project. Some Gantt charts also show the dependency (i.e., precedence network) relationships between activities. Gantt charts can be used to show current schedule status using percent-complete shadings and a vertical "TODAY" line as shown here.
Although now regarded as a common charting technique, Gantt charts were considered revolutionary when first introduced. In recognition of Henry Gantt's contributions, the Henry Laurence Gantt Medal is awarded for distinguished achievement in management and in community service.
This chart is also used in Information Technology to represent data that has been collected.
The first known tool of this type was reportedly developed in 1896 by Karol Adamiecki, who called it a harmonogram. Adamiecki only published his chart in 1931, however, in Polish, which limited both its take-up and recognition of his authorship. The chart is named after Henry Gantt (1861–1919), who designed his chart around the years 1910–1915.
One of the first major applications of Gantt charts was during the First World War. On the initiative of General William Crozier, then Chief of Ordnance these included that of the Emergency Fleet, the Shipping Board, etc.
In project management terminology, resources are required to carry out the project tasks. They can be people, equipment, facilities, funding, or anything else capable of definition (usually other than labour) required for the completion of a project activity. The lack of a resource will therefore be a constraint on the completion of the project activity. Resources may be storable or non storable. Storable resources remain available unless depleted by usage, and may be replenished by project tasks which produce them. Non-storable resources must be renewed for each time period, even if not utilised in previous time periods.
Resource scheduling, availability and optimisation are considered key to successful project management.
Allocation of limited resources is based on the priority given to each of the project activities. Their priority is calculated using the Critical path method and heuristic analysis.
For a case with a constraint on the number of resources, the objective is to create the most efficient schedule possible - minimising project duration and maximising the use of the resources available.