1.  What is project management?

It is the “application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities in order to meet or exceed stakeholder needs and expectations from a project.”
Source:  Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)

2.  Why use project management?

For companies:

• To meet company/customer timing and resource constraints
• To reduce inefficiencies and costs
• To improve discipline and professionalism amongst employees
• To improve project co-ordination between all departments
• To identify potential problem areas in advance rather than crisis management

For individuals:

• To plan, organize, and control your work more effectively
• To manage your own responsibilities
• To enhance communication skills
• To help achieve company goals and objectives
• Have ownership and accountability for your own work tasks

3.  What are the central supports of project management?

• Timing
• Resources
• Costs
• Management

4.  What are the principal steps?

• Obtain authorization from project sponsor
• Establish team with commitment to objectives
• Establish project plan of agreed expectations and deliverables
• Define the project activities and key milestones
• Assign responsibility to activities (“who’s doing what when”)
• Assign logical relationships
• Calculate the project schedule
• Implement plan maintenance and update cycle

5.  What are the benefits of project management?

Timing:

• Dynamic planning, control and management of work
• Identifies activity start/finish dates, critical path, float
• Identify and monitor activity progress/slippage
• Outlines impact of timing constraints
• Status vs. Target Analysis
• Can help towards smaller project “cycle times”

Resources:

• Dynamic planning, control and management of resources
• Accurate planning of current and future workloads
• Supplier accountability and tracking
• Global planning of resources over one or many projects or locations
• Justification of future resource requirements

Costs:

• Accurate control and management of costs summarized by project, plant, supplier etc.
• Early warning of potential cost overruns
• Cost comparisons between suppliers/in-house
• Identify budget reserves and undistributed funds

Management:

• Monitor important elements of the business without becoming submerged heavily into detail
• Control multiple projects running simultaneously
• Efficient control of budgets and resources
• Ensure a high quality structured business approach