Project management encompasses few work effort such as planning, monitoring and control of a business or IT infrastructure development and the motivation of all those involved in it is to achieve the project objectives on time and within budget, to ensure the result will meet or exceed stakeholder expectations, guarantee quality and improve performance, so that the organization can ultimately gain from the successful completion of the project. There are five main steps in a project management:
Define a Problem
The first step is a project management is defining a problem. When defining a problem, a project manager should focus on answering the basic questions: What are the requirements of the clientele to be fulfilled? What are the measures to solve the problem? What are the options? It is always a good way to start defining a problem by writing a project charter. The most common expected benefits of a project are improving profit margin, saving operational costs and time.
Plan the Project
Devising the project plan is to define the scope of task, requirements required to obtain the expected results, materials and human resources. Project planning also includes creating project team, collaborative communications and risk management plans.
The objectives of the project must be consistent with and well connected to the overall objectives of the organization. Below are some factors that must be thoroughly determined in initial project planning:
- Participants list
- Objectives of technical implementation
- Schedules and budgets
- Performance and responsibility areas
Most importantly, the initial project plan must be reviewed and approved. Moreover, project specifications must not be changed without the customer’s permission.
Execute the Plan
Executing is the process that being used to complete the works which defined in the project plan so that the project’s requirements can be accomplished. During project execution, the project team is more focused than the project manager, as the task is actually carried out by the project team, which means the members of the team, is creating the product or service to achieve the objective of project. The project manager works closely with the entire team and executes the intent of the plan.
To execute the project is to:
- To complete the project work and create the product scope by obtaining and using the appropriate resources.
- To spend the project budget as planned and complete the project procurement needs.
- To manage and lead the project team, managing the project risks as identified in the risk planning processes, and to incorporate approved changes into the project scope.
- To assemble project data and communicate the information as the project communications management plan dictates, also communicate with the appropriate stakeholders.
- To create the lessons learned documentations and get the project work done.
Monitor and Control Progress
Potential problems can be identified by monitoring and controlling. Monitoring is actually the processes that performed to monitor the project is being executed smoothly and expectedly, and controlling is to adopt corrective action to control the execution of the project.
Close Project
Closing is a controlled way to end a project. It is a formal acceptance of the project. The activities involved in project closure are to archive the necessary files and to document lessons learned. It is important to ensure that a project is properly closed, because a completed project may be drifted on or developed into other projects. Therefore, we must ensure that the work of the project team is officially acknowledged and the lessons to be learned from the closed project are properly recorded for use on the next project.
