What is a Project
A project consists of a series of tasks or activities that have several distinguishing characteristics:
- The project has specific starting and ending dates
- It has well defined objectives
- It achieves a specified product or result
- It is a unique, no repetitive endeavor
- Cost, time schedules and resources are consumed
What is Project Management
Project management is defined as managing and directing time, materials, personnel/labor, and costs to complete a project in an orderly, economical manner and to meet the established objectives of time, costs and technical’s and or service results.
A successful project using project management will have the following three stages:
- Planning
- Scheduling
- Controlling
Planning
The first step in project management is to do proper planning in which you should determine the goals and objectives of the project as well as the strategy and course of action to achieve these goals objectives. The objectives and goals of a project should be precise, clear, well defined and more importantly specific, and they should be communicated to all the people working in the project, because this will in better contribution of the people in achieving the organizational goals and objectives.
Scheduling
In this stage, we determine that how much time we need to complete the project and how much time each and every activity will take in the project. Furthermore, we decide that what activities should be done first, what seconds and what should be done at the end part of the project.
Controlling
This is the stage of having check and balance over everything that is going on in the project. In this stage we compare the actual performance or progress of the project with the established or planned one to see whether we are meeting the goals or not, if yes then we carry on with our tasks, if not then the management should take corrective actions to overcome the situation an drake things back on track.
