No matter the role or industry that you're in, you have probably heard the term project
management.
If you're still wondering what is project management, well, you're about to find out.
And if you stick around until the end of this video I'm going to share with you how you
can get your hands on a very special free guide on why and how to ensure your projects
don't fail.
Hi, if you're new here, welcome, my name is Adriana Girdler, and on this channel you're
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If you want to know what is project management, let's get to it.
Project management explained.
Project management is a process that guides teams to ensure that they reach their deliverables
and their goals.
All businesses rely on projects, because again, if you're not doing your service or your related
activity to your services or your product, you're probably doing something from a strategy
standpoint which is a project or an initiative.
And again, that has project framework associated with it.
Project, just so you know from a definition standpoint, is we're looking at it has a definitive
start, a definitive end.
There's usually tasks associated with the goal that you're trying to deliver.
And you usually bring about other subject matter experts together to help you accomplish
those goals.
Now, when you're doing project management you bring in specific skills and tools and,
as I said earlier, subject matter experts.
There's definitely documentation you have to look at, and some really good specific
techniques to ensure that you are remaining on scope, time and budget.
That is really important when it comes to projects is you want to ensure that you're
always delivering what you're supposed to be delivering, and that expectations are constantly
being met.
So, what are some project examples?
Well, a really good one is new software, so software companies are constantly doing new
projects.
Construction, if you're building a house.
Sometimes organizations will have new initiatives internally that they're trying to do.
It could be like a new process or a way of working that the whole organization has to
be aware of.
That becomes a project.
How about a product launch?
That becomes a project.
Pilot concept and testing, those are projects.
That just gives you an idea of how wide the gamut of projects really are.
Again, what I said earlier, start, finish, bringing in subject matter experts, you have
certain tasks that are leading you to an overall goal and deliverable.
You don't have to call them projects.
You can call them initiatives, you can call them activities, it's all the same thing.
So, it's really important that you understand what exactly is a project.
Now, if you're really liking what you're hearing so far, oh my goodness it would help me out
so much, give it a like.
I really would appreciate it and it really will help more people get this video.
Thank you.
The core components of project management.
You really need to have an understanding as to why you're doing this project.
That becomes a justification background information.
You also want to have a very clear idea of what the risks are, assumptions, you need
to manage those.
A lot of documentation is associated with this so that you can keep on top of your monitoring
and execution.
Communication is a really huge thing as well, you're constantly communicating not only within
your project team, but outside of your project team with stakeholders.
And that leads to change management, that's a big component of project management as well,
particularly when you have a deliverable that is going outside of anyone that you currently
were in contact with like your project team or senior executive sponsorship.
If someone else is going to be getting it, then you need to have change management around
there.
There is a very strict discipline and very specific tools associated with that, which
does help from a core competency perspective.
So just think of the things like your scope statement and your charter and the justification
and your communication and change management and risk, all of that stuff really makes up
the core components of project management.
What the life of a project looks like.
What I said earlier on is remember, a project is a process.
So there's a very distinct five stages to project management no matter the methodology
that you use.
And I'll explain that in a moment.
The five stages consist of, one, initiation.
This is where you're getting all the information as to why and what you're doing a project.
You really get your scope statement here and you're working with senior executives, and
they're helping you out to define a lot of things.
The next stage, which is stage two, is planning.
This is where you're figuring out, you're getting your charter, you're figuring out
who you need.
You're putting very high level framework of the constants you're going to be moving forward
with team members, and also a kick off.
The next stage is execution.
Execution is just that, you're executing the project plan that you did in the planning
stage.
Now this is where I want to get some clarity for you, because I hear words, or you may
have heard words like, "Waterfall project management," "Agile project management."
This is where those methodologies will now come into play.
So, project management there's a framework, there's structure to it, like I'm telling
you right now these five stages we're going through.
And in this stage three, execution, is when you start bringing in specific methodology
depending on the project that you're working on.
So, if you're working on software, at this stage you are going to then bring in agile
principles to help execute the build of the software that you're doing.
Let me just make sure this is really clear because this gets confused.
You still have to do initiation, you still have to do planning.
You still have to do those two fundamental stages.
But when you're executing your plan, you then can go into a waterfall methodology, an agile
methodology, whatever type of project, hybrid methodology, is going to work for you.
Fourth stage for sure is monitor and control.
This is where the risk comes into play.
You want to make sure that you're addressing all of that stuff.
Change management, things of that nature which is monitoring, controlling, ensuring that
you're always going back, having that iteration of tweaking things so that you're always moving
forward towards a deliverable.
And last but not least is closing.
And this gets ironically missed a lot.
I don't know why.
Well, actually I do know why, because it's paperwork.
We all hate paperwork, we're probably given the next project so we say, "Ah, I'll do that
later."
But don't miss out on this stage because that's where after action reviews come into play,
we call them postmortems as well where you learn from past projects or your project workings
that you were doing, so what worked well?
What didn't work well?
So in the next project you don't make those same mistakes.
Again, you don't want to be repeating the same issues, right?
You want to learn from them.
So, that closing becomes really important.
So that's the framework, that's the life cycle of project management.
The importance of project management in organizations cannot be overstated.
It is critical to success.
You really need to have this framework in order to move strategies and initiatives forward,
so don't lose out on it.
And on that note, don't lose out on this.
It's a free download just for you.
Learn what those key mistakes are as to why projects fail, because you don't want that
to happen.
And guess what?
It's free, so definitely check it out.
Until the next video, thanks.