An alternate point of view is that project management is the discipline of defining and achieving targets while optimizing the use of resources (time, money, people, space, etc). Thus, it could be classified into several models:time, cost, scope and intangibles.
Project management is quite often the province and responsibility of an individual project manager. This individual seldom participates directly in the activities that produce the end result, but rather strives to maintain the progress and productive mutual interaction of various parties in such a way that overall risk of failure is reduced.
What is a project?
Compare a project to say, a manufacturing line, which is intended to be a continuous process without a planned end.
Typical projects might include the engineering and construction of a building, or the design, coding, testing and documentation of a computer software program, or development of the science and clinical testing of a new drug. The duration of a project is the time from its start to its completion, which can take days, weeks, months or even years.
Approaches
Generally, there are two approaches that can be taken to project management today. The "traditional" approach identifies a sequence of steps to be completed. This contrasts with the agile software development approach in which the project is seen as relatively small tasks rather than a complete process. The objective of this approach is to impose as little overhead as possible in the form of rationale, justification, documentation, reporting, meetings, and permission.
The traditional approach
In the traditional approach, we can distinguish 5 stages in the development of a project:
project initiation
project planning
project production
project monitoring
project completion
Not all projects will visit every stage as projects can be terminated before they reach completion. Some projects probably don''t have the planning and/or the monitoring. Some projects will go through steps 2, 3 and 4 multiple times.
Many industries utilize variations on these stages. For example, in bricks and mortar architectural design, projects typically progress through stages like Pre-Planning, Conceptual Design, Schematic Design, Design Development, Construction Drawings (or Contract Documents), and Construction Administration. While the names may differ from industry to industry, the actual stages typically follow common steps to problem solving--defining the problem, weighing options, choosing a path, implementation and evaluation.
Project management tries to gain control over five variables:
time
cost
quality
scope
risk
Three of these variables can be given by external or internal customers. The value(s) of the remaining variable(s) is/are then set by project management, ideally based on solid estimation techniques. The final values have to be agreed upon in a negotiation process between project management and the customer. Usually, the values in terms of time, cost, quality and scope are contracted.
To keep control over the project from the beginning of the project all the way to its natural conclusion, a project manager uses a number of techniques: project planning, earned value, risk management, scheduling, process improvement.
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