Project Management


Project management comes whenever you think of starting a project, the first thing that hits your mind should be managing the project tasks so that your project will complete on time, within budget and with all the required qualities in your project.  In Project Management we apply knowledge, skills, techniques and tools to achieve our goals within our budget and time schedule. If we achieve our goal within time, budget and required standard then it is project success. Project failure occurs when your project is not completed within time and budget. Sometimes your project fails in terms of project management at starting and after some time with your efforts and new strategies it generates more revenue and overcome loss and it became success of project. For Example In Case of Air Bus A380 They faced issues of electrical wiring, delay in unit delivery but after their efforts they become the most successful airline. There are certain project activities which are also called phases of project management are given below:

Project Management Activities/Phases

1.      Planning

In project planning, we define the objectives of our project means which objective we want to achieve from our project, we describe the resources available for our project, we develop work breakdown structure in which we break a project into sub-components to its minutest level and we develop hierarchy in which we explain things like who will be the project manager, the team mates and assign activities to them. Through work break down structure we will know the activities from which you can do sequencing, costing and then scheduling. After costing and scheduling of individual activities then sum up all to know the total budget of project. It is the first and essential phase of project management.

2.      Scheduling

This activity of project management shows relationship of each activity to others and to the whole project. It identifies the precedence relationship among activities and encourages the setting of realistic time and cost estimates for each activity. In this activity, we identify the critical bottlenecks in the project. The techniques applied in scheduling are to ensure that all activities are planned for, their order of performance, the activity time estimates are recorded and the overall project time is developed. It also determines the critical activities which cannot be delayed because if critical activities are delayed your whole project will be delayed which nobody wants obviously!

3.      Controlling

This is followed up by planning and scheduling phases. In this phase we monitor activities of project, compare them with our own set standards which we want to achieve, revise them and in case of any deviation from our goal we take corrective action. In this we compare our results with our desired outcome and if our results are not matched with set standards then immediately we take action. The most important part of project management is controlling.

project management techniques


Project Management Techniques

Mainly there are 3 techniques of project management which are a follows:

1.      Gantt Chart

It is a type of a bar chart which shows the starting and ending of different activities but the sequence of activities is not defined for this problem we use software which solves the problem of scheduling. In that software we define the predecessor or successor and starting ending dates then the software gives all sequence, calculates any slag or float in activities and draw all the network

2.      PERT

PERT is project evaluation & review technique which was developed by US Navy in 1950. This project management technique is used when we do not know the timing of activity in which the starting and ending is not known. PERT is used for planning, scheduling and controlling. Through PERT three times can be obtained which are optimistic time (it is a positive approach, the minimum time in which an activity can be completed under favourable conditions), most likely time (when you are repeating a certain activity and now you know in how much time a certain activity can be completed) and pessimistic time (it is the darker side, the maximum time in which the activity can be completed under unfavourable conditions). In this we calculate standard deviation, variance and probability. PERT is used for those projects where time is not known to complete certain activities. It is used in research and development projects because we do not know the exact completion time. While doing PERT analysis we do not consider cost it consider time.

3.      CPM

CPM stands for critical path method which was developed by DU Pont in 1957, it is a project management statistical technique which predicts overall project duration. In this we calculate the critical path and critical path tells us earliest time by which the project can be completed. This technique is used when projects are repetitive in nature and where one has experience of handling similar projects. It is used in plant maintenance and construction work because in CPM we are the completion time with certainty. In CPM we see total time required for completion, the cost required and its minimization.