Project Management 101

Project Management 101 – An important part of being a project manager is overseeing the team’s progress and making decisions to ensure maximum value. Therefore, it’s essential to understand the basics of project management, whether in a large company working with project managers, or in a smaller startup where it falls on your shoulders.

One of the major challenges within project management is making sure you do not start a project unless all of its parameters have been approved by the different stakeholders. Therefore, we will examine how to create a business case, conduct a feasibility study, and write a project charter.

We will also explore the four phases of the project management lifecycle, which will show you how to initiate a project, create a project plan, execute against that plan, and monitor progress before and as you close the project.

Plus, we will look at task breakdown, estimating project costs, and how to create a visual representation of a project’s main delivery dates and milestones via a Gantt chart.

Project management involves initiating, planning, executing, controlling, monitoring and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success objectives within a specified time. Project management comes with very specific and prominent constraints of scope, time and cost.

This trio is better known as the triple constraint of project management. The primary challenge of project managers is to meet project goals and objectives within the given constraints. Thus, planning and organisation plays a major role in setting the path for a project to progress and get completed successfully.

Project management does not only involve planning for tasks and assignments within the timelines and costs assigned. A significant part of project management involves developing and maintaining good relationships with all stakeholders concerned with or contributing to some or the other aspect of the project.