What is project management? who is responsible for it and where exactly its used?
In: Economics
In the very literal sense, they manage projects that require many interrelated parts working together. Common areas where project managers are used include web design/software design, construction. The project manager is one who creates timelines for each person/role and coordinates hand-offs between, communicates with client, helps gather resources.
Say you’ve hired a company to build a website for your company widgets.com. The company you hire needs to have a UX designer wireframe the functionality, have a graphic design make it look pretty, have a front end coder make it interactive, and a back end coder needs to tie it into your inventory system, order systems, payments, etc., have quality control testing done, and so on.
The project manager is the one who figures out how long each step takes, communicates with you when feedback is needed (here are 3 designs, what are your thoughts?), requests logos and text from you, makes sure the front end coder understands how site should function, make sure back end programmer is building out the systems necessary to tie into front end, help toubleshoot when there are issues/delays, adjust timeline and communcate that to client and internal team, document testing and communicate issues back to relevant part of team.
I was tempted to answer this tongue in cheek and say “it’s all about managing projects and is done by people who manage projects” but that probably isn’t what you are looking for. There are a lot of different types and aspects of Project Management so for the sake of my sanity I am going to focus on what I am most familiar with – consulting.
The company I work for is a consulting company. People pay us money to deliver services. These services primarily take the form workshops and trainings for anywhere from 3 to 1000+ people. Our Sales Team may sell the deal, but they don’t have the time nor often skill set to conduct the full training. We have Facilitators who are experts at running the trainings themselves but they are also extremely busy since if they aren’t training someone they are dead weight.
But can you imagine the sheer logistics that has to go into arranging a training for 1000 people? Setting up the slide decks for the facilitator, making sure that we have schedules in place, timelines for when a deliverable is due, actually putting together those deliverables (up to and including physically binding a 1000 booklets), and the countless other things that have to be done before, during and after the Facilitator gets on stage and starts talking? That’s where our Project Management (PM) team comes in.
Their primary skillset is time, people and resource management. They know the full scope of what we promised to deliver (it’s in our Statement of Work) and they have a robust process in place to build out the necessary materials. They are managing the calendars of the Facilitators, their supporting folks, the Customer, and everyone else involved. They are creating/modifying the materials that the Facilitator will use, and the deliverables that we will be giving the Customer at the end. A good PM has the entire process running like clockwork so that the Customer has a great experience and the Facilitator is getting on stage with everything he/she needs to deliver the training. In short, they are responsible for making sure that the project (the service we are being paid to deliver) is completed in a timely and accurate manner.
OK. Say you want to do a complex and difficult task. Say build a house. That complex task can be broken down into smaller singular tasks with an easily defined starting point and ending point. Then you analyze each one for how long it takes, what resources it requires and how it relates to the other tasks. Some tasks can only happen after other tasks have been completed (cant paint a wall that hasnt been built yet). Some tasks cannot happen anymore after other tasks were completed. Some tasks must happen simultaneously, some tasks cannot happen simultaneously because for example they require the same resource which cannot do two things at once.
Project management is the art of keeping track of all of these relations at once, forming an ideal plan based on those relations to meet certain criteria (such as *minimize time, minimize cost, do not hire more than X people simultaneously etc.*) dictated by the context of your project and by whoever hired you to do it and then actually seeing it throug in real time and when needed adjusting the plan when circumstances change.
Next time you walk into a grocery store, ask yourself: “How did they know how many shopping carts to buy for the amount of customers they expect to have, and how did they get here?”
The answer is: “Because a project manager made that all happen.” During the process that was the “project” of opening the store for the first time, the PM ensured that all of things that needed to happen in order to arrive at exactly X shopping carts actually happened on time.
Evaluations of cost, square footage, opening dates, size of shopping aisles, shopping cart color, marketing, etc. All of that had to be in place before someone placed an order for carts.
That’s project management. Turning an idea (“Hey let’s open a store.”) into actual plans and activities.
PMs don’t make the decisions for a project. They *organize* the decisions.
Think of scheduling the project, for instance. The building must be open on this date, which means the carpet must be installed no later than this date, which means the concrete must be poured no later than this date, etc. Also, the carpet people can’t be in the building at the same time as the plumbers, or whatever.
It’s the PM that keeps track of this, and says “have the concrete guys start pouring on this date.” And then keeps checking in with everyone to make sure they’re on schedule.
PM isn’t just schedule, it’s also minimizing the total cost, leveling out the work across the team (one woman can make a baby in 9 months, but 9 women can’t make a baby in 1 month) and keeping all the stakeholders informed and happy.
When someone in a meeting says “oh! should we check with group X to make sure we’re allowed to do Y?” it’s the PM that is responsible for figuring this out and handling it.
The schedule will have to slip a week or else the cost will go up $100,000? Who do you need to tell this to? When is the meeting to decide, and who is invited? What other changes have to happen (tell the carpet people to delay a week / tell the bank you need more money / whatever.)
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