Thoughts about project management

Project management is a unique profession. While many profession are tailored to a specific industry project management is a broad industry wide skill that is essential in the modern world.

Project management is a profession. It involves the ability and know how of a person or a tem to manage a single project from a starting point to and ending point. The start point and end point are sometimes not intuitive as projects are sometimes actually sub projects of a bigger project but in all cases a project has a clear definition of what the starting point is and what the ending point is which is of course the goal or target for that project.

A project manager is the person who is responsible for managing the project. Small projects have a single project manager while very large project can have a large number of managers usually reporting in a hierarchical path that funnels all the way up to a chief or master project manager. Regardless of the size of the project all project have a common structure. The starting point is defined as some current state of how the project starts. The ending point is defined as the result of a successful project.

A project would also have a timeline which defines when the project starts and when it ends. The project timeline can also include intermediate milestones usually used to check if the project is progressing on time for longer projects. And a project has some allocation of resources over time. Resources can be allocated all at one time during the beginning of the project or they can be allocated in some fashion over the course of the whole project. Resources can vary from project to project. Project resources almost always include labor or manpower and a budget or money allocated to the project but they are not limited to that. Resources can also include materials vehicles real estate allocated for staging a project governmental attention and much more.

Project management is the management of the conversion of some starting point to an ending point using the resources allocated to the project. The task of the project manager is to make sure that all the activities that are needed in order to complete the project on time and by using only the allocated resources are done correctly. The project manager must make sure that the project meets all the constraints that were defined for it. For example a construction project can include safety constraints. A tunnel digging project can include minimal noise and dust constraints. A building demolition project can have constraints on damages to surrounding buildings and the time it takes to the dust cloud to settle.

Project management is taught as a general vocation by many institutions. There are also some standardized test that entitle project managers that pass them to receive a project management professional certificate which can be useful when trying to land a project management job or when trying to win a project management contract or bid.