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Project Management - It’s Complicated!

January 5, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management for Beginners

Project Management - It’s Complicated!
By Barney Austen

As someone who has worked in the world of project and program management, it never ceases to amaze me on how complex project management has become. I often think that many in the field have lost sight of the end game through the continued re-invention of the wheel. This will be subject of many a post but to get started, I thought I’d take the opportunity to de-mystify some of the more common project management terms and put them in plain English by applying them to a business context.

Project Management Speak What It Actually Means! Example - Building A House
Critical path analysis Do things in the right order i.e. there are some things that have to be done before others. Put in the foundations before you try and build the walls.
Gantt Charts Visual display of a projects activities and timelines. Timetable for when each bit of the house will be constructed.
Activity duration How long something takes! How long will it take to build the foundations and how long do they have to rest before you can build on top of them.
Stakeholders Parties interested in the outcome of the project. The customer you are building for, you (should be making a profit), your sub-contractors…
Checkpoints Time to check out how things are going. Architect reviews the foundations and makes sure they look ok.
Deliverables What you should be producing as part of your project Architects plan, Foundations, building itself, fixtures and fittings…
Contingency budget and plan We know something is likely to go wrong, what do we need to put aside to cover ourselves? When doing the foundations, we had to re-route some piping in the drive that we didn’t know was there. The customer is not paying us as we should have spotted this. Our contingency fund should cover it.
Communications plan Who needs to know what and when Your customer and the team building the house.
Core Team The main team responsible for making sure the project happens. Architect, you and your lead sub-contractors.
Request for change We missed something in the requirements that needs to be budgeted for, paid for and included in the plans. Can we have granite floors instead of wooden please?
Change Control Board People needed to approve a change to the original plan. Architect, you and your lead sub-contractors.

These are a few of my favourites – there are plenty more. All of these are relevant to businesses of every description but the language of project management has made them seem removed and exclusive which I find frankly unnecessary and frustrating!

Do you have some more to add? Do you feel project management principles apply to your business or seem to daunting to tackle? I’d love to know your thoughts.

Barney Austen is the founder of http://beta.myprojecttracker.com/ (still in Beta), an easy to use, cost effective, powerful tool to provide both business owners and project managers the key information needed to run their projects efficiently and effectively. Barney Austen’s passion is to help businesses through the provision of functionally relevant, but intuitive products. You can read more from Barney on his company’s blog, available here.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 and is filed under Project Management for Beginners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 people have left comments

Hi Barney - I like how you pointed out that all businesses use this information. Many of them don’t realize how close they actually are to operating at a level of disorganized project management, and that if they employed practiced and standardized project management techniques, they would be SO much more productive!

Laura Bamberg wrote on January 7, 2010 - 9:47 am | Visit Link

Hi Laura - thanks for the feedback. I agree 100%on your point. I believe that most business managers are caught between a rock(not knowing that PM practices can help them) and a hard place(finding time to learn them and applying it to their business).

Barney Austen wrote on January 8, 2010 - 3:27 am | Visit Link

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