Project Management for Professionals - Introduction

Project management is all about the effective management of projects, sets of discrete activities intended to achieve discrete ends.

Most people think about projects in terms of major tasks. In fact, all jobs can be broken into projects by grouping related activities against desired ends.This means that project management techniques can be applied at all levels in organisations to improve performance.

This new series of posts describes our approach to project management. They are not intended to be definitive, but to provide a guide to effective project implementation

All professiomals stand or fall by our ability to meet client need. If successful, we will get further work from that client or through his/her contact network. If we fail, the reverse holds true.

Project management is all about the effective management of projects, sets of discrete activities intended to achieve discrete ends.

Most people think about projects in terms of major tasks. In fact, all jobs can be broken into projects by grouping related activities against desired ends.

This means that project management techniques can be applied at all levels in organisations to improve performance. It is not sufficient, however, just to meet client need.

Our profitability depends upon payments for our time, upon payments for our intellectual property and upon recovery of disbursements. So we must not only meet client need, but also do it in the most cost effective way possible.

We also need to ensure that we capture all the lessons and intellectual property belonging to us generated by the project. Effective project management of individual assignments is critical if we are to achieve these various objectives.

However, the importance of good project management does not end here. In practice, all activities can be turned into projects by grouping related activities against desired ends. In turn, this allows project management approaches to be used at all levels in all organisations to improve performance.

Against this background, these posts will provide a step by step approach to the adoption of simple project management techniques.

Note on Copyright

Material in this series is drawn from the Ndarala Group Short Guide to Project Management. The material is copyright Ndarala but may be reproduced and quoted with due acknowledgment.