How Do I Understand Project Management?
Posted on June 10, 2008
Filed Under project management |
We can find projects—and project managers—everywhere. Every graphic artist, systems analyst, carpenter, engineer, attorney, and scientist who is creating a unique product is faced with the challenges of leading a project. As more repetitive jobs are replaced by automation, it is increasingly a necessity to be able to lead change. Economically, the arguments for understanding project management are even stronger. People and companies that innovate, that create and lead change, enjoy higher incomes and profit margins than those that compete based on economies of scale and efficiency. Project management is not new. The pyramids and aqueducts of antiquity certainly required the coordination and planning skills of a project manager. While supervising the building of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Michelangelo experienced all the torments of a modernday project manager: incomplete specifications, insufficient labor, unsure funding, and a powerful customer. But only in the twentieth century did the title and the discipline emerge. Much of modern project management was defined in the 1950s, on the major cold war defense programs. As a result, the discipline grew up within the aerospace and defense industries, but in the 1990s project management broke out of its traditional boundaries. It is now a recognized and valued skill set in organizations across the spectrum, from health care to manufacturing, software to natural resources. The evidence is everywhere:
- By 2004 nearly every Fortune 500 company had attempted to implement a project management office (PMO) in one or more parts of their organization. A PMO is responsible for instilling consistent project management practices. Only a decade earlier, most executives in these companies hadn’t even heard of such an entity.
- The use of formal project management cost and schedule reporting techniques—required for decades on U.S. Department of Defense programs—is now required of all U.S. federal agencies.
- Since 1990, the Project Management Institute, the professional association for project managers, has seen its membership rise from 7,700 to over 100,000 in 2004.
- Competition from a global economy is so pervasive that it is forcing firms to collaborate across organizational and geographic boundaries, introduced the term virtual teams to our business vocabulary.
- Evolving technology has put every one of us on ever-faster upgrade cycles. At a personal level, our phones, computers, and cars become out of date faster. For businesses and governments, the upgrade cycles include refineries, chemical plants, medical clinics, and weapons systems.
- The availability of a highly skilled temporary labor force is a perfect match for the projectized economy, providing the ability to rapidly increase or decrease staffing as projects begin and end.
Projects are all around us. Project management skills transcend corporate and industry boundaries, enabling us to do the same. The people who lead projects—who turn visions of what might be into tangible products and services—stand out. Further, the biggest driver of the growth in project management is getting even bigger. As we will see in the next section, change is everywhere, and change means projects.
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i want to study project management online how do i go about it. i’m in Ghana.
I am not an expert in this field, but when it goes down to studies online, one of the top universities is Open University in UK - http://www3.open.ac.uk, but you can find some others as well, that offer online(distant studies).