Project Management: Life Is One Big Project.' The Trick Is in Managing It

Project Management
I Lecture
‘Life is one big project.’ The trick is in

managing it.
Project Management
Project Management is no longer about managing the sequence of steps required to

complete the project on time. It is about systematically incorporating the voice of the
customer, creating a disciplined way of prioritizing effort and resolving trade-offs,
working concurrently on all aspects of the project in multi-functional teams, and
much more. It involves much closer links between project teams and downstream activities,
e.g. in new product development, integration with manufacturing, logistics and after-sales
support – in this case 80 per cent of the costs are determined before they take over!
There are huge opportunities for eliminating wasted time and effort in almost every
project. In manufacturing, Toyota estimate that only 5 per cent of activities actually
add value, 35 per cent are necessary but do not add value, whilst the remaining 60 per
cent is pure waste – ‘muda’ in Japanese! By halving the effort in designing a new car,
they
show this muda can be reduced by good project management. Every project
manager in
the future has not only to manage their own project but to seek ways of eliminating
the
muda in their systems so they can do more for less, and more quickly next time!
Project management has a fundamental role in modern organizations
and the careers of the people working in them.
Does it matter what activities do and do not constitute projects? Almost any
activity can be claimed to be a project. One practitioner put it very simply: ‘a
project is whatever I call a project’. One step on from this is the most basic
of accepted definitions: a project is a task that has a beginning and an
end.
What is Project?
Association for Project Management (UK’s largest professional body for

project
managers), 2004: Projects are unique, transient endeavours
undertaken to achieve a desired outcome.
Project Management Institute (world’s largest professional association), 2004:
A project is a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique
product, service or result.
British Standard 6079, 2000: A unique set of coordinated activities,

with definite starting and finishing points, undertaken by an
individual or organisation to meet specific performance
objectives within defined schedule, cost and performance
parameters.
PRINCE 2 2009 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments – UK government
standard for project management), A management environment that is
created for the purpose of delivering one or more business
products according to a specified business case. And: A temporary
organization that is needed to produce a unique and predefined
outcome or result at a given time using predetermined resources.
Project Management Association of Japan, 2005: A project refers to a
value creation undertaking based on a specific mission, which is
completed in a given or agreed timeframe and under constraints,
including resources and external circumstances.
Some common themes are evident here:
1 Unique: the exact project has not been performed before. The
project has a degree of novelty, in terms of time, place, team carrying out the
task, product or service being provided. However, something like it has almost
certainly been done by someone somewhere before. For this reason, projects are
said to have aspects of uniqueness.
2 Temporary: the project does have a beginning and an end, as for

our earlier definition, and requires a group of people to carry out the task
(the establishment of a temporary organization). When the project finishes, the
team moves on. The financial resources available to the project are also
temporary and almost always finite – when the project is completed the funding
ceases.
3 Focused: the task of the project is to deliver a particular product,

service or result (the specific mission). This is not to say that every project
starts out with a complete and clear idea of exactly what will be achieved and
how.
Project characteristics
Projects are undertaken to deliver benefits. This characteristic is

evident in both commercial and non-commercial projects.
Related to this characteristic, uncertainty is another fundamental of
projects. The future cannot be predicted with certainty, and in many cases
nor can the response to activities carried out in a project. Where emergence
referred to the requirements of the project, uncertainty covers all of the
environmental conditions in which a project has to operate. In addition to
having uncertainty, projects have another characteristic – they usually
involve change.
The change issue leads us to another facet of projects – they are not machines
but are groups of people carrying out a (hopefully linked) set of tasks. We say
that unlike a machine that is real and tangible, a project is a social
construction – it was literally devised by people. It involves people and
systems of people, both in the project team and associated with the project as
customers, for instance.
The nature of the task (aspects of uniqueness, mission focused, involving change,
having emergence and uncertainty) and the means by which it is delivered
(through a temporary organization, which is a social construction involving
integration). Further exploration of the means for delivery shows that this is rarely
entirely random (though there are exceptions) and that project managers use
combinations or systems of activities, people and organizations to deliver the
project. Such a system of delivery is termed a process.
The traditional project management area is low-volume, high-
variety processes, where the notion of uniqueness prevails.
Examples of these are the first moon landing and the development of the
first computer.
For many organizations, projects are fundamental to the way

they operate. Engineering group Siemens, for instance, estimated that 50
per cent of its revenue was from projects.
Whole sectors of industry are project based organizations (PBOs),
including much of the engineering and construction sectors, many
public-sector bodies and much of the IT industry. Construction alone makes up
in the region of 8 per cent of gross domestic product in the European Union.
Government, from local up to European Union level, carries out a significant
proportion of its business through projects. Projects are central to our
economies.
Difference between General Management and Project Management.
Project Manager
A project manager is a person who has the overall responsibility for the
successful planning and execution of a project.
project managers - project integrators, responsible for integrating the

required resources, knowledge and processes from the project’s beginning to
end.
History
major influences on modern project management can be identified

as coming from work carried out in the 1950s. Obviously, small- and large-
scale projects were undertaken before the 1950s. Individuals managed events
and other situations. For example, the Pyramids were constructed, wars
were fought and products were developed.
During the 1950s, formal tools and techniques were developed to help
manage large, complex projects that were uncertain or risky. The chemical
manufacturer Du Pont developed techniques (critical path analysis (CPA)
for scheduling maintenance shutdowns at the company’s production facilities.
In the same period, the defence contractor RAND Corp. created its tool
(Programme Evaluation and Review Technique or PERT) for
planning missile development. These tools focused almost exclusively on the
project-planning phase and there were no close rivals for their use. The
methods survived and became accepted practice.

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Project Management

‘Life is one big project.’ The trick is in

Project Management is no longer about managing the sequence of steps required to

Association for Project Management (UK’s largest professional body for

British Standard 6079, 2000: A unique set of coordinated activities,

2 Temporary: the project does have a beginning and an end, as for

3 Focused: the task of the project is to deliver a particular product,

Projects are undertaken to deliver benefits. This characteristic is

For many organizations, projects are fundamental to the way

project managers - project integrators, responsible for integrating the

major influences on modern project management can be identified

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