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Project Management - Overview

Projects come in all shapes and sizes, from the small and straight-forward to extremely large. The scope and complexity of the project varies with the objectives it aims to achieve. Project management is all pervasive in most functional aspects of the business. Be it people, products, services, materials, production, IT and communications, plant and equipment, storage, distribution, logistics, buildings and premises, staffing and management, finance, administration, acquisition, divestment, purchasing, sales, selling, marketing, human resources, training, culture, customer service and relations, quality, health and safety, legal, technical and scientific, new product development, new business development; and in any combination.

Project management skills are essential for project managers, and for those managers including your IT Suppliers who manage complex activities and tasks. These skills are highly resourceful and profitable especially in projects where different outcomes are possible, requiring planning and assessing options, organizing activities and resources to deliver a result.

Like each organisational function, project management has defined methodologies and framework which allows project interpretability, faster communication, sharing of goals, progress, tracking resource, cost and time availability. Without this defined project management methodologies, those who commission a project, those who manage it and those who work on it will have different ideas about how things should be organised and when the different aspects of the project will be completed.

Very often, the absence of such methodologies results in chaos and conflict of areas with projects ending up delayed and with spiralling cost and resources. Those involved will not be clear about how much responsibility, authority and accountability they have and, as a result, there will often be confusion surrounding the project.

Projects thus invariably fail to succeed or take off beyond their initial step or are severely delayed thus hampering organisation goals and objectives.

Common causes for failure

	Lack of co-ordination of resources and activities amongst members of the project
	Lack of communication with interested parties, leading to products or services being delivered which are fail to accommodate customer’s needs and requirements.
	Poor time planning and costs handling, leading to projects delay and increasing costs.
	Outcomes or progress not measured nor tested
	Inadequate planning of resources, activities, and scheduling
	Lack of control over progress so that projects do not reveal their exact status until too late
	Lack of quality control, resulting in the delivery of products that are unacceptable or unusable.