Harvard Business Essentials Managing Projects Large and Small: The Fundamental Skills for Delivering on Budget and on Time

1

Project Management As a Process

Four Phases

Key Topics Covered in This Chapter

• An overview of the four phases of project management
• Uncovering the core issues of your project
• Identifying your project’s stakeholders

PROJECTS COME in all types and sizes, from building orbiting space stations to installing new information systems.Yet the essential elements of project management are the same. Those elements are typically handled within a four-phase process:

1. Defining and organizing the project
2. Planning the project
3. Managing project execution
4. Closing down the project

This chapter provides an overview of that process.

Figure 1-1 represents the four phases as an integrated model. In one sense, this model is linear: First, we define and organize ...