The Importance of Project Management

This article is about the importance of project management itself, and managing that project in a successful way from beginning to end.

There are benefits to having good project management – effective project management leads to meeting stakeholder objectives, increasing the chances of the project success, resolving problems and issues as they arise (which they always do), responding to risks that might arise, as well as optimizing the use of organizational resources so the people that you’re bringing on board to your project can be used in the absolute best way. Identifying failing projects and sometimes terminating them if you absolutely need to, and managing all of the constraints – money, scope, time frame – all of those need to be managed or shuffled around so you can still meet the project objectives.

Poor project management on the other hand is a different story. I’ve seen this many times and I’m sure you have to, because project management is quite difficult. That’s why it’s nice to have a framework to operate by. You could have missed deadlines where now all of a sudden your project is late. You could have cost overruns where now all of a sudden it’s going to cost two million dollars instead of 1 million dollars or fifty thousand dollars instead of twenty thousand dollars whatever it is.

You could have poor quality – so it’s not actually meeting what the customer wanted. You could be having to rework things to redo them over and over again and the customer is not happy about that. Expansion of scope, otherwise known as scope creep, where the things that the customer wants actually end up being more and more and more and they weren’t designed in the initial project for what we wanted to deliver.

Using a Proven Project Management Framework

There are lots of things that can happen if a project is not managed well, and even when it is managed well. These things can go wrong but that’s the benefit of having a framework to manage it by – you know you’re doing the absolute best you can to try and get these things on the left here (meeting those stakeholder needs, increasing the chances of success) rather than having missed deadlines or cost overruns.

Operations, Projects, Programs, Portfolios

There is a relationship here between three things and we’ve got basically at the very base level, at the operating level where things are done on a day to day basis we’ve got the operations of a business. And that’s where we’ve got shared resources and shared stakeholders, we’re going to have to use these resources and these people from within the organization to help us get the project done, and that’s an essential thing that we need to manage throughout the life of a project.

The next layer from there are our projects, and these are the things that are delivering change to our BAU or operations, but sometimes you want to have a really good overview of all of these multiple projects – there’s lots of projects happening and you need something to clearly define a bunch of those projects in one, and that’s where we come into a program.

Program managers might have a couple of projects, a handful maybe 10 maybe even 20 sometimes where they’ve got multiple projects all delivering the same strategic objective, they’re all delivering a similar thing but doing different things.

Lastly made up of programs and projects and operations are our portfolios. A portfolio manager will have multiple programs and then multiple projects under each of those programs and then lots and lots of BAU teams and operations within the operations side of the business.

– David McLachlan