The Field of Project Management

The Field of Project Management

Project management provides people within organizations with a powerful set of tools, used along with experience, to improve on what they know about planning, implementing, and managing the tasks and activities that are used to accomplish specific organizational goals (Larson, 2012). A project is a response to a need, the solution to a problem. The project managers responsibility is ensure that the schedule, cost, functionality and the quality targets are all met effective and efficiently to complete the project for organizational goals (Heerkens, 2002).

Project management (PM) is the most import role in businesses today; PM techniques are to ensure that organizations are allocating their resources effectively and efficiently. Even though project management is a lot different from any other type of management, because a project manager (PM) does not have direct control over members of their team and the teams are just temporary. The guidance that is provided is to help meet the customer's focus and needs and at the same time meeting the organizational goals. By implementing the foundation of project management strategies, any organization will be able to narrow their focus, reach desired goals and achieve the goals with specific time and cost perimeters or restrictions. Project management helps guide the resources used to meet the customer's focus, needs and satisfaction while reaching the desired outcome.

The concept of research and critical thinking in the planning of the project is probably mandatory for so many reasons but ultimately is to be able to reach and complete a critical goal for the organization. The planning provides a roadmap that the project manager uses to lead a team to the projects competition. My project manager always tells us to work smarter, not harder and throughout ten years of project participation, I have even surprised myself on how much I have learned, how to avoid time constraints and to not get caught up in the weeds. Project planning helps to improve and increase the satisfaction of our customers; when we send out emails about projects that will be done during the evening or weekends; the first thing one customer wanted to know was if her shoes would be put back the same way she has them. The customer does not understand the concept of a project and I believe that is it important to see a happy client. We put as much detail that we feel necessary in our communications to give the internal clients reassurance that the project will be completed with them in mind. During our monitor refresh project we told the customers via email and a there were a lot of questions about the "stickies" they have on their monitor and that they be put on the new monitor. We made sure this "small" request was completed and we received about 40 emails of thanks for the fact that their stickies were put back and they only know that we had been there was because the monitor was bigger.

These small things help us in satisfying the customer and providing us the customer with growth and positive growth and the customer with confidence and trust in us for future projects. The team receives positive results and now has more confidence and can request more respect from their project manager and in turn the project manager can get more benefits from the stakeholders and their confidence that the team will perform great on future projects. Planning gives a more competitive edge, improved growth and development within teams, flexibility and opportunities to expand services because of better performances (Picariello, 2010).

The project life cycle management is what project manager's use as the cornerstone of working on one of the project life cycles to ensure that anything unpredictable for the limited life or the project and that all four phases are considered (Larson, 2012). The four phases of project management process are the defining stage, the planning stage, the execution stage and the close out phase; there are also eight steps in the process as well. The eight steps are included in one of the phases, in the defining stage, the is a need to identify the problem or opportunity, identifying and defining the best project solution, identifying the task and resource requirements. The second phase is the planning stage where preparation of the control schedule and resource are allocated, the estimating the project costs and project budget preparation, analyzing risk and establish stakeholder relationships, maintaining, controlling and communicating as needed during execution, and finally managing an orderly close-out (Heerkens, 2002). All of the steps within the phases are part the project management process and if each are not completed the project can lead to failure.

The benefits of project management to an organization are all the elements that encompass the relationship between the stakeholders, managers and the people that do the work. In my organization the stakeholders are those type that are not above dealing with business services; we know our stakeholders and not only have we in the technology department gained experience from the benefits from project management, but so have they. They are easy to talk to and negotiate realistic goals, for cost, time and experiences. Though a project is really only just a concept at the beginning, a project needs to happen because of a requirement. There has to be the demonstration