Redirected from Project Management
Project management is the ensemble of activities to plan and follow the execution of a project.
(The contents of this page represent a more "traditional" approach to the subject. Contrast this with an Agile methodology approach such as Scrum for a different point of view).
In general, we can distinguish 5 stages in the development of a project:
Not all projects will visit every stage as projects can be terminated before they reach completion. Some projects probably don't have the planning and/or the monitoring. Some projects will go through steps 2, 3 and 4 multiple times.
Project management covers four parts:
To keep control over the project from the beginning of the project all the way to its natural conclusion, a project manager uses a number of techniques: project planning, earned value, risk management, scheduling, process improvement.
|
There are a number of guiding techniques that have been developed over the years that can be used to formally specify exactly how the project will be managed. These include the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), and such ideas as the Personal Software Process[?] (PSP), and the Team Software Process[?] (TSP). These techniques attempt to standardize the practices of the development team making them easier to predict and manage as well as track.
Critical chain is the latest extension to the traditional critical path method.
In critical studies of project management, it has been noted that several of these fundamentally PERT-based models are not well suited for the multi-project company environment of today. Most of them are aimed at very large-scale, one-time, non-routine project, and nowadays all kinds of management is expressed in terms of projects. Using complex models for "projects" (or rather "tasks") spanning a few weeks has been proven to cause unnecessary costs and low manouverability in several cases. Instead project management expertis try to identify different "lightweight" models, such as, for example Extreme Programming for software development.
The main thrust of Process Management is the concept of knowledge management. It is the experience of companies that use these models that the creation of a set of defined processes detailing what the company actually does has enabled them to achieve consistency across project teams and project. They have also found that, when it is defined, their ability to track and monitor performance with a view to improvement is far more successful.
See also: An exhaustive list of standards (maturity models) (http://www.pmforum.org/prof/matmatrix.htm)
So far, there is no known attempt to develop a project management standard available under the GNU Free Documentation License. There is a proposed Project Management XML Schema (http://www.pacificedge.com/xml/xml.asp).
See also: project management software, critical path, critical chain
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump