Managing Projects Essay

Over my career, I’ve been involved in a many projects such as the acceptance of new electric rail cars to the development of a computerize maintenance management system. These projects involved dozens people, crossed department lines and spanned many months from their conception to their implementation. While most of what I learned was acquired during the project, I attended a project management course that was offered by my company’s training and development department. Whether serving as a team member or project leader, I’ve gained many insights into the process of project management.

‘Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements’ (Project Management Institute, 2009, p12). Once a project has been approved a project manager is assigned to the project, and ‘is expected to integrate all aspects of the project, ensure that the proper knowledge and resources are available when they are needed, and ensure that the results are produced in a timely, cost-effective manner’ (Meredith and Mantel, 2010, p5). In order to allow this to happen there are several key aspects of a project which need to be carefully thought out and controlled.

Activities A, B, and C are the starting tasks, while activities I and J are the end activities of the project. Dummy activities Start and Finish with duration 0 are added in the network diagram to make the calculation of critical paths simpler (You can remove these dummy variables if you want). Following duration for each activities are provided:

Executive Summary Project management is the science of planning, organizing, executing, and managing the resources needed to achieve a specific goal. Effective project managers (PM) strategically facilitate the entire project management process to ensure the project’s success. To do this the PM must adequately meet the specific requirements (i.e., time, scope, quality, and cost) set forth by the project and its stakeholders. It is theorized that PM must possess a set of core competencies in order to successfully manage a project. Those competencies are development of project management knowledge areas, application of appropriate project management tools and techniques, understanding of the project

Project Management is the art of arranging, sorting out, spurring, and controlling resources to attain specific objectives. A project is a brief endeavor intended to deliver a unique product, service, attempted to meet extraordinary objectives and goals, commonly to achieve helpful change or included quality.

In project management, there are many methods to handle how the project should be completed, how an ethical situation should be handled, what types of decisions should be made. Furthermore, how much knowledge the project manager should possess, their focus of completing the job on budget and schedule, and understand the scope, as well as, knowing how to communicate.

When any organization undertakes a large-scale project, the first and most important component to ensure that the process runs smoothly and effectively is effective project management. Project management not only sets the tone for the overall project, but creates the plan and facilitates effective implementation. From the first meeting to plan the project to the last report written about the experience, project management is integral to project success.

While projects can be similar in some instances, no two projects are ever the same. For this reason, management of projects requires the application of tools and techniques to meet the goals of the temporary endeavor. Project managers apply these tools and techniques to determine what is required for project delivery such as the list of activities to completed, the time required to complete the activities, resources needed and the various risks associated with the deliverable and efforts. A multitude of tools and techniques are employed by the project manager based on the need of the effort to organize, identify and communicate the various aspects of the project. While in contrast, the repetitive nature of operations activities

The traditional approach to project management is to identify where he or she is right now, and what he or she is trying to accomplish, and the steps needed to take to arrive where he or she wants to be. Project management is the process of activities or tasks that lead to the successful completion of a project. Carrying out a simple project that involves two or three individuals or one that involves a mix of individuals, tasks, and organizations is a big difference. If an individual has an unlimited amount of money and time, project

The critical path method (CPM) is a step-by-step project management technique for process orchestrating that defines critical and non-critical tasks with the goal of averting time-frame quandaries and process bottlenecks. The CPM is ideally suited to projects consisting of numerous activities that interact in an involute manner. Then the connections between the tasks, kenned as dependencies, are established. By following a path among the project tasks that is the longest

Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.

Reducing the duration a project can be managed by reducing the duration of an activity/activities almost always results in higher direct cost. When the duration of a critical activity is reduced, the project’s critical path can be change with other activities and that new path will determine the new project completion date. Following are three options to reducing project duration.

(1.1) (1.2) (1.3) (6.1) (6.2) (6.3) (6.4) (7) (8.1) (8.2) (8.3) (9) (10) (11.1) (11.2) (11.3)

Prior to this course, I thought that in order to manage a project you need to be a project manager. However, this course changed my perspective on project management. As I continue to read the book, I realized that I actually manage many projects, and project management is not only limited to organizations. Throughout our lives, we manage many projects from planning a wedding to building a house, some of those projects may take few days and some may take years to complete. In addition, I also learned that there are no two projects that are alike, each project has it’s own unique elements that set it apart from other projects.

Historically, project management can be observed as back as the humanity on earth i.e. the human came with needs and requirements and to fulfil them, they required to perform different activities. The way in which activities were performed to do work improved with passage of time like manufacturing of great pyramid that would be impossible without having effective management of work activities. Similarly, with passage of time, improvements in field of project management resulted into highly sophisticated and modern tools for project management like during 18th century, Henry Gantt developed Gantt Chart, aimed to depict and describe activities to be perform, date of initiation, ending dates and so on. Similarly, another important invention in this regards was of development of Critical Path Analysis, developed by Dupont Corporation during late 50s, followed by development of WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) developed by American State Defence Department (Aleesha,