Project management is one of the most critical components of a successful business, and it affects revenues and liabilities and ultimately interacts with customer or client satisfaction and retention. Your company might have only one project at a time, while other giant corporations and entities might juggle several projects simultaneously. By their very nature, projects are temporary.
Projects are a means toward a goal, and the plan will eventually be reached. Your business might move on to another project…or not, which might have been a one-time objective.
Projects prompt a burgeoning need in the workforce. The Project Management Institute estimated that, during the 2010–2020 period, more than 15 million new project management positions would be added worldwide.
Project management is not the entire operation of your company. It's just one segment, a specified project with a detailed plan on how you and your business will achieve that goal. It's a plan detailed in a series of steps, each as important as the others. You must complete one to move on to the next property.
Think of project management as a ladder you must climb. You can't leap to the top, and it would be best to take it rung by rung for the utmost efficiency. Your team must apply the tools available to them and their expertise and knowledge to execute each step and move on to the next.
It's easy enough to say you want to get to Box A, so you will take 25 steps in that direction. But you must also factor time considerations into your project plan, and you most likely have to work within a budget. You might crawl those 25 steps, or you might jog. It depends on how quickly you must get there to complete the project. You can save money by traveling on foot or hiring a driver. It depends on the budget you've dedicated to the project.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach, system, or plan. Each project you and your company tackle will likely have its timeline, goal, and budget. That's why it's so critical to have a savvy, talented project manager in place to run the show.
A successful project manager must simultaneously manage four essential elements of a project. These elements are interrelated:
1. Scope: This involves the project's size, goals, and requirements.
2. Resources: You'll need people, equipment, and materials in place.
3. Time: This doesn't just address how much time the project will take; it must be broken down into task durations, dependencies, and critical paths.
4. Money: Have a firm grasp on costs, contingencies, and profit.
The scope defines what the project is supposed to accomplish and the time and money budgets created to achieve these objectives. Any change to the project's scope must have a matching change in funding, time, resources, or all three.
If the project scope is to construct a building to house three widgets on a budget of $100,000, the project manager is expected to do that. If the scope is changed to a building for four widgets, the project manager must obtain an appropriate change in time, money, and resources.
There are three aspects of understanding and managing resources: people, equipment, and materials.
A successful project manager must manage the project's resources effectively, including team members, vendor staff, and subcontractors. He must ensure that his employees have the skills and tools they need to complete the job, and he must continually monitor whether he has enough people in place to complete the project on deadline. His career is to ensure that each person understands the task and project deadlines.
The senior member of each group of employees reports to the project manager when managing direct employees, but employees might also have a line manager who provides technical direction. In a matrix management situation like a project team, the project manager's job is to provide direction to the line managers. Managing labor subcontracts usually means controlling the team lead for the subcontracted workers who work those workers.
A project manager must often procure equipment and materials and manage their use so the team can operate efficiently. He's responsible for having the appropriate equipment and materials in the correct location at the proper time.
The three elements of successful time management are tasks, schedules, and the critical path.
Build the project schedule by listing, in order, all the tasks that must be completed. Some must be done sequentially, while others can overlap or be done in tandem. Assign a duration to each task. Allocate the required resources. Determine predecessors—what tasks must be completed before others—and successors, the tasks that can't start until after each other task is completed. This project management aspect is sometimes referred to as waterfall management because one task follows another in more or less sequential order.
Project management software can simplify creating and managing the project schedule.
Some tasks have a little flexibility in their required start and finish dates, called "float." Other tasks have no flexibility, and they have zero floats. The critical path is a line through all the jobs with zero float. All charges on this path—and multiple parallel paths—must be completed on time if the project is to arrive by its deadline. The project manager's essential time management task is monitoring the critical path.
The three considerations in managing money are costs, contingencies, and profit. Each task has a fee, whether the labor hours of a computer programmer or the purchase price of a cubic yard of concrete. Each of these costs is estimated and totaled when preparing the project budget.
Some estimates will be more accurate than others. Therefore, the project budget should include a contingency allowance—money set aside in the budget "just in case" the actual cost of an item is wildly different from the estimate. Profit is the money the company wants to make from the task, and it's put on top of the cost.
So a project budget is composed of the estimated cost, plus the contingency, plus any profit. The project manager's job is to keep the actual cost at or below the estimated cost and maximize the company's profit on the project. Successful project management takes practice. These ideas can give you a basic understanding of project management but consider it only a beginning. If your job or career path includes project management, and if you want to improve your skills, talk to successful project managers, read, and practice. Project management can be a gratifying career.
Yovza technology is one such company helping with the emerging need for project managers. They are creating a network of contractors and suppliers to create a nexus of stakeholders— this allows him to connect and be on top of his stakeholder's actions. He can start his project's operations by simplifying the approval workflow with a cloud-based platform, providing a network base for various project stakeholders and real-time analytics.
They aim to improve the construction management system and highlight the environmental benefits of virtual approvals instead of printed documents. This saves the planet and saves time and effort, which has been scarce in today's world. With a growing influence in the industry, the company has strategically planned to solve and address each construction industry's problem today.
