What is project management? who is responsible for it and where exactly its used?
In: Economics
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.
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