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Project management is the practice of planning, organizing and controlling formal initiatives of change. This is an intuitive process that involves defining a project, planning it, delivering work, monitoring & control and closing. The following are common project management practices.
Project InitiationThe initial planning for a project that builds up to approval for the project to proceed. Project initiation includes any business cases for the project, requirements gathering and initial project planning.Project PlanningDeveloping an end-to-end plan that spells out how a project will be executed, monitored and closed. This includes areas such as objectives, scope, project quality, communication and risk. Arguably the core part of a project plan is a work breakdown structure and schedule that layout tasks, activities and milestones.Stakeholder ManagementStakeholder management is the process of identifying stakeholders and their precise role in a project including responsibility and accountability. This also involves managing stakeholder relationships, engagement and communication. A key concept here is managing expectations whereby the project manager ensures that stakeholders aren't imagining that out-of-scope items will be delivered.Project ExecutionThe process of delivering the planned work to achieve project objectives. In other words, the actual implementation of the project. This often involves handling of new change requests and clearing of issues as the project progresses.Monitoring & ControlThe process of monitoring and regulating the project as it unfolds. This includes critical processes such as change management and issue clearing. Project quality, risk and performance are also monitored, measured and communicated.Project Risk ManagementThe process of identifying, treating and monitoring project risk. This usually revolves around a risk register that captures identified risks and their estimated probability and impact.Project ClosureThe process of closing a project including final sign-off by stakeholders. Project closure typically includes a lessons learned process and a handover of project deliverables and documentation.Project Management AlternativesWhen people think of project management they often think of a waterfall approach whereby there is a big upfront plan to do some significant work. This can be contrasted with an iterative approach whereby you release improvements quickly on much shorter planning cycles of a few days. Perhaps the most common waterfall methodology is known as Project Management Professional (PMP) and the primary iterative methodology is known as Agile.Generally speaking, iterative approaches have far less overhead and can be viewed as more efficient and more responsive to change. This is critical for small firms, particularly startups, that want to get change out quickly to show results and test ideas.Larger firms may involve significant numbers of people in a project such that this may be relatively hard to orchestrate on short iterative cycles. Large firms also do big things such that it is difficult to imagine these large changes being produced one step at a time. As such, large firms mostly use waterfall methodologies but may deploy iterative methods here and there for projects with limited scope.Next read: Examples of Projects
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