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CHAPTER 1
Introduction to Project Management
Welcome to Project Management Essentials! Whether you have been managing projects for years, are tasked with managing your first project, or are just interested in learning more about project management, this book will be a great resource for you. We’ll not only go through best practices from start to finish of a project life cycle, but we’ll also provide you with templates and examples from a variety of organizations.
The purpose of this chapter is to help you:
1. Describe measures of project success on your projects and use that knowledge to guide your planning and implementation.
2. Determine the project life cycle you will use, whether predictive (traditional or Waterfall), adaptive (Agile), or hybrid, along with the stages of work and approvals needed to move from one stage to the next.
3. Define major responsibilities of the key players (project manager, sponsor, core team members, and subject matter experts [SMEs] in traditional projects and scrum master, product manager, and team members in Agile projects), at each stage of your project life cycle.
In this chapter, we will introduce project management, and then discuss what project success is and what is required to achieve it. We will also introduce the concept of a project life cycle with traditional (planning), Agile (adaptive), and hybrid variations. The final section of this chapter deals with key roles and responsibilities needed to successfully complete projects.
What Is Project Management?
Let’s start at the very beginning: What is a project? A project is a onetime undertaking that will result in a new product, event, or way of doing things. It will have a defined start and finish—though a project’s duration could be anywhere from a few hours to many years. And just as efficient management is needed for the day-to-day activities of running a business or a household, effective project management is needed to guide any type of change. An effective project manager must be adept at overseeing the planning and work necessary to create the unique product or service prescribed by the project. In fact, the top 2 percent of project managers spend, on the average, twice as much time in planning as the other 98 percent of project managers.1 This includes both the tasks (science) and relationships (art) needed to understand the work and keep it moving with, through, and for people.
Here are just a few of the reasons executives we’ve worked with have given for why project management is so important to them:
• Project management brings objectivity to projects.
• It represents an investment in current and future projects.
• It’s necessary for planning and executing communication and coordination throughout projects.
• Project management helps our understanding of the big picture.
• It provides a standardized process for resolving conflicts.
• You can’t run a business without project management.
• Without it, people just assume things.
While the tools we will show you in this book are scalable—in other words, they can be made more or less detailed to fit the size and scope of your project—they will all be based on the international standards detailed in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), 6th edition.
Exhibit 1.1
Meeting Agreements
What Is Project Success?
An old rule of thumb has been that successful project completion is comprised of three factors: being on time, on budget, and achieving the specified level of technical performance. Performance includes both completing everything (called scope) and having it work correctly (called quality). These three factors (time, cost, and performance) make up a factor called meeting agreements, as shown in Exhibit 1.1. Meeting agreements is often how project managers are most closely evaluated, but it is second in importance.
The more important issue is the impact on the project customer. The very reason for performing a project is that someone or some group wants the project deliverables to use. Customer success includes customer satisfaction and successful implementation of project deliverables. Regardless of whether your customers are internal or external to your organization, their approval should be your first and foremost goal.2,3 Sometimes additional success measures are also considered, such as other benefits to the organization and development of project participants.
Exhibit 1.2
Project Success Measures Template
| Success Measure | Relative Importance | How Measured | When Measured |
| Customer Success | | | |
| Satisfaction | | | |
| Use of deliverables | | | |
| Meeting Agreements | | | |
| Performance | | | |
| Time | | | |
| Cost | | | |
| Other | | | |
| Business | | | |
| Participants | | | |
In later chapters, we will go into greater detail about how to set and attain project success metrics. For now, begin to consider how important each success measure may be, and how and when you expect to measure it. Exhibit 1.2 is a template to help you gather your thoughts on success for your project, and...
