Project managers have objectives throughout the lifecycle of their projects.
Introduction
Project management is an extremely powerful discipline and skill-set that can make significant improvements to a business. It achieves this through creating new products and services, improving how businesses do things and reducing the possible impact of future changes.
For a project manager to consistently deliver high-quality projects on time, on budget and on schedule, there are a number of objectives and principles that they need to follow. In this article we explore the main areas and objectives in project management and what project managers need to do to achieve them.
The main objectives of project management
The main objectives and principles behind good project management are as follows:
Agree exactly what a project is meant to do and what it is meant to deliver.
Agree the scope, timescales, cost and quality of a project.
Maintain a schedule and project plan.
Deliver the agreed outcomes of the project to the right scope, timescales, cost and quality.
Provide communications, reports and progress updates throughout the lifecycle of the project.
Manage risks, issues and dependencies.
Make sure that the business gets the outcome that it wants from the project.
Manage policies, processes, tools, frameworks, techniques, people and relationships to a successful project outcome.
Minimize any impact on normal business operations.
We will explore what is involved in each of these areas below.
Agree exactly what a project is meant to do and what it is meant to deliver
Understand the business requirements of a project.
Understand the benefits of delivering a project in terms of possible future profits, risk reduction or process improvement.
Establish and agree exactly what a project is going to accomplish.
Get sign-off from the business and other key stakeholders on what the project is going to do.
Agree the scope, timescales, cost and quality of a project
Establish exactly what is and is not in scope of the project.
Agree up-front and ongoing resource costs and budgets.
Understand exactly when the project is going to deliver its key milestones.
Measure how the project is going to achieve quality by meeting business requirements.
Achieve sign-off of cost, scope, budget and quality from the business and other key stakeholders. Saving Changes...
