Post 1 - What is Project management?

For those of you who are new to project management like myself, you may have asked yourself the question 'what is project management?',  and I guess you have every right to ask. I myself was rather interested to learn about it, and in this post, I want to shed some light onto my discovery.

First of all, I was rather fortunate to be accepted onto the IT Project Management Masters course at Stockholm University. This was definitely an eye opener for me into the world of project management. In all honesty, before this course I was in my own bubble and if you had asked me anything about project management, you may have seen a quick smile on my face and a prolonged silence. What I have learnt from starting this course, is to appreciate my limit in knowledge and embrace new information.

Now getting back to the topic, I'd like to introduce you to a valuable guide into the world of project management. If you're not familiar with the PMBOK Guide put together by PMI (Project Management Institute), then you're missing out. I would suggest that you start reading this book by any means possible. I've learnt a lot from this book so far; no wonder it is considered to be 'the gold standard' for project management.

In this book I came across valuable and important definitions of project management terminology as well as examples of their actual meanings and implementations.

Let' get to the the real stuff:

To understand what 'project management' is, you would need to firstly understand what a 'project' is. Believe it or not, there's actually more than just a project that can be managed in project management. I discovered that there are also 'programs' and 'portfolios' that come under management. We will maybe introduce those in a further blog post. However for now, I would like to point you to the definition of a 'project' from the PMBOK guide itself. If you refer back to page 4 of the book we learn that;

 ' a project is a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service or result.' 

So, what does that mean in layman's terms; it means that a project is some sort of result that an organisation is trying to achieve, which eventually requires someone to manage it.  From my further reading, these results can  indeed be a product that the organisation want to produce or a service that they're trying to provide or any other result they want to achieve. 

In conclusion, now that we know what a 'project' is, the question is 'what does project management mean'? I will let you try and guess ...

Have you figured it out? I bet you did!

Yes, It is the management of these products, services or results/outcomes an organisation is trying to achieve. 

This is a quick and simple definition, however, I would advise my readers to refer back to the PMBOK to further their understanding of project management and if you would like to learn about terminology then refer to the book below (which is a PMI book on project management lexicon):

Project Management Institute. 2016. The PMI Lexicon of Project Management Terms. Available from

http://www.pmi.org/lexiconterms

Please feel free to leave your own learning findings below or any comments you'd like to make.

See you in my next post for another learning discovery.

Post 2 - Projects, Programs and Portfolios

What are they?

In this post I'd like to elaborate on something I slightly touched upon in my previous post about project management; and that was, that there are more than just projects that an organisation may want to manage. 

If you remember well, we defined what a project was and , you should now be able to say that a project is a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. 

Now keeping that in mind, and focusing on our post title, I'd like you to guess where we are heading.  

Yes, you are right if you said that we need to understand what the differences are between Projects, programs and portfolios. 

I firstly would like to define what a 'program' and a 'portfolio' is this is because I have found that when you want to learn any form of new knowledge it's best to familiarise yourself  with lexicon from the actual study itself; and where else is best to refer back to than the PMBOK Guide itself. 

Through my readings I was able to distinguish between these 3 aspects to project management and I would like to highlight my findings to you here; so lets delve into the definitions of each:

What is a Program?

According to the PMBOK a program is:

A group of related projects, subsidiary programs managed together in a coordinated manner to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually.

What is a Portfolio?

According to the PMBOK a portfolio is:

A portfolio is a collection of projects, programs, subsidiary portfolios, and operations managed as a group to achieve strategic objectives. 

Now the question we need to ask is:

Do they relate to each other?

The figure below taken from PMBOK  page 12, illustrates a good example of how projects, programs and portfolios relate to each other. 

As you can see, a portfolio is the top level of management  and may have under it one or more programs running. Programs on the other hand are second level and may have one or more projects grouped under them. The Projects as you can see are individual endeavours that the company may undertake

Do they differ?

As you can see that they have their relationship but from their definitions, projects, programs, and portfolios indeed differ. If you were just reading the definitions alone, you would get an idea of what each ones' focus is and how they are managed. 

However, you will need to further understand that programs and portfolio management differ from project management in many aspects. These differences include the actual objectives and activities of each one as well as the focus, life cycles and benefits of each. 

We will discuss these different aspects in another post.

Please feel free to add any comments or suggestions as usual

Post 3 - Purpose of project management

We've spent some time on defining what project, program and portfolio management are as well as touching upon their relationship and differences.

I thought I'd write this short post to answer a question you may indeed be asking yourself; 

'What's the actual purpose of project management?'

Well, to answer this question, I'd like to ask you whether you've ever planned a trip whereby you had plans to achieve a certain target; maybe it was to see some places or buy some stuff and found yourself unable to do so due to a shortage in time or money?

If this is the case, then you may relate to project management.

Did you feel in that situation, that if you had planned ahead by looking into how long each activity you planned to do in your trip would've taken, or calculated the costs of what you wanted to buy in advance, you may have saved yourself time and money?  Did you feel the need to resolve issues like this in the future? Well, keep on reading then. You may probably be asking yourself the question below.

How does this relate to project management?

Well, if big projects are left without having strict planning for budgets, resources and completion time, then unlike the small inconvenience you may have faced by running out of time or money on your trip, companies could lose a lot of resources, time and millions in cash money.

What's the actual purpose of project management?

Project management was developed to predict and foresee any problems (of course a lot bigger than your trip issue) that may occur; manage and control these issues as well as the complex and diverse activities within projects. This is through extensive planning and co-ordination with the organisation and its entities.

Projects have a mutual point of trying to bring about their endeavours by coming up with ideas and activities that will be required.

This is where project management comes in to save the day and brings to life the organisations aims.

In the next post, we will discuss how project management fulfils its purpose foreseeing issues before they arise and fixing them.

Like always, feel free to comment and add your thoughts.

Post 4 - Some Activities of Project Management

We covered in the previous post, project management isn't something done, just for fun and it actually has a very important purpose. I'm sure by now you understand what this purpose is. If not, then I'll remind you; it is to avoid project failures through careful planning.

Just so you understand, it doesn't necessarily mean that a planned out and managed project will definitely be successful, there's always an element of risk in any project and we can never foresee everything that can cause failure within a project. However, through the necessary skills and planning techniques learned in project management we can try to overcome and avoid failure.

If you search online for failed projects, you'll see tons of these examples. Take a look at some in the link below:

https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/failed-projects

So, can project management help our projects succeed? Of course! but in order to understand this, we need to understand the question below.

What does project management involve?

Project management can involve a whole load of activities, these are covered thoroughly in the PMBoK Guide for your reference. However, I'll touch upon three of the important activities I myself have learned and feel are a backbone to planning.

The first activity and most important of them to me is the 'defining of objectives' activity. This is important because I believe that if the objective is defined and specific, then it's easier to achieve a specific desired outcome. When it's general, then it's harder to measure your success accurately.

The second activity that plays an important role in a projects success, is the 'development of budgets and estimating costs'. This activity is very important as the organisation, will most likely have hired you to save them some money while you execute their project. Not planning for a budget beforehand can get you in a very tricky situation (a lot trickier than that trip of yours).

The third activity that is important and I feel an organisation will be very keen on defining, is the 'time to completion'. This is because each important stages of the project will need to fall on the given dates and the organisation will need to identify whether the progress is being met.

These are some of the activities undertaken in project management; please refer back to the PMBOK Guide for a more extensive list.

Like usual, feel free to leave a comment or suggestion.

Post 5 - The Project Life Cycle

Now that we have moved past and described some important activities fulfilled through project management, I came across an interesting chapter in the PMBOK Guide that I thought to be suitable for this next post.

You may have asked yourself, like I did 'how are project activities organised or put together?'  I was able to discover answers to this through further reading. I was able to learn about something called a 'project phase'.

What is a Project Phase?

The real question should be, once the activities for a project have been defined, then how do they get processed?Do we execute each activity randomly or is there a set plan for organising them logically?

Well, I was relieved to find out that there was some organisation involved.  I learnt, It's a good idea to analyse activities and see how they can be grouped into smaller workable loads to make processes easier.

I believe that there's no better way than to group activities based on how logically related they are to each other in achieving a particular deliverable. These related grouped activities are called a 'project phase'.

Now that that's out the way, and we have a few different project phases consisting of different activities, how do we manage each of these phases? Is there some sort of logical ordering involved?

Well, this is where we introduce you to the 'project life cycle'

What is a Project Life Cycle?

A project life cycle is just that; a way of organising and moving through the different phases of a project.

In a more accurate definition, a project life cycle a series of phases that a project passes through from start to completion. The life cycle ensures that each phases of the project are completed.

What if a particular phase is incomplete?

This is where a 'phase gate' comes into play.

What is a Phase Gate?

A phase gate or control gate (there are a few different terms for this actually) is the review at the end of a particular phase to make a decision on whether to move onto the next phase or not. As you would have thought, the decision at each phase gate will of course be dependent on whether the activities of each phase have been completed sufficiently. 

If the progress is insufficient, then the project manager would decide on the necessary action to take. This decision could even be to repeat a particular phase or more.

As you can see, there's a lot involved in ensuring the project’s success. A thorough and regular analysis of the projects life cycle can indeed improve overall project performance.

Please feel free to add your thoughts or comments

Post 6 - A Project's Success

I thought in this post It would be a great idea to share with you an interesting part of project management came across.

As I continued my daily reading of the PMBOK Guide, I started becoming familiar with the project life cycle, processes/ activities, business cases and business needs in project management.

 However, I still had an important question, which I didn't have an answer to.

That question was ' How do we determine whether a project is successful'? 

Strangely enough, through my initial readings of the organisation and it's planned objectives, I remember thinking to myself, surely there are different stakeholders in a given project, so each one must have an intended outcome as well as his own idea of what the important success factor for the project is.

It was good that I continued reading as I was able to understand that project management acknowledges these varying stakeholders interests and I also found out how it deals with them.

I discovered that a project manager has to document clearly defined objectives of stakeholders in order to select the measurable ones that can he can then use to measure success. 

Undefined objectives leave room for questions of whether or not results have been produced.

It was interesting to come across some of the important questions a project manager along with the stakeholders should answer.

What does success look like for the project?

How will Success be measured?

What factors may impact success?

For me I can see where these answers and understanding agreements between project manager and stakeholders can play a vital role in avoiding later disagreements as to whether he result was achieved.

The above along with a proactive communication with the stakeholders and a good assessment of the project situation could help with the success of a project.

More importantly, I discovered that as long as the project remains aligned with the plan and strategic direction of the company, then it's likely to succeed.

The success will inevitably be measured through the analysis of the project delivery results.

Please feel free to add on to this any suggestions or comments

Post 7 - BRM - Benefits vs Value Difference

Just thought, I'd share an interesting difference I discovered between benefits and value.Although in general terms they may seem quite similar and be used interchangeably the BRM book gives a good definition of each and as follows:

A benefit is as a gain realized by the organization and beneficiaries through portfolio, program, or project outputs and resulting outcomes

These are some of the examples of a benefit: increasing sales, revenue, or profits or reducing time, cost, or effort. These benefits can be tangible or intangible, but they work better when they are

On the other hand;

Value is the net result of realized benefits less the cost of achieving these benefits. Value may be tangible or intangible

So in theory, the value is the final actual result of the benefit, after you've taken into account and deducted the costs.

Hope you understand the difference now.