Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

What Is Project Management?

Project management is the art of balancing project objectives against the constraints of time, budget, resource availability, and quality. Achieving that balance requires skill, experience, and a boatload of techniques. This section gives you a glimpse of what happens from a project’s infancy to its old age.

Novices sometimes think of project management as building a sequence of tasks, but those in the know recognize that project management starts before a project officially begins and doesn’t end for a while after the project’s objectives are achieved. There’s no one “right” way to manage projects (the box on Picking a Project-Management Methodology identifies a few different project-management methodologies), but most methodologies cover the following five phases (illustrated in Figure 1-1):

• Getting started. Often called initiating, this first phase of project management is short but important. It’s your only opportunity to get the project off to a good start. In this phase, you answer questions like “Why are we doing this project?” and “Do we really want to do it?” The initial attempts to describe the purpose of a project may produce vague results like “Hold an event to raise money.” But as you identify the stakeholders (Identify Who Has a Stake in the Project), you learn what the project is about and what the stakeholders hope to achieve. The more specific you are when you describe a project’s objectives, the greater your chances for success.

  Neglecting to line up support for a project (Gaining Support for a Project) is all too common, and it’s always a big mistake. A project needs buy-in from an executive sponsor (Identify Who Has a Stake in the Project) and the stakeholders to survive challenges like contradictory objectives, resource shortages, funding issues, and so on. What’s more, you, the project manager, need official support, too, so everyone knows the extent of your authority.

• Planning. This phase, which Chapter 2 covers in greater detail, is where you draw your road map: the objectives to achieve; the work to perform; who’s going to do that work, when; and how much the whole thing will cost. Moreover, you set out the rules of the game, including how people will communicate with one another, who has to approve what, how you’ll manage changes and risks, and so on.

• Performing the project. Also referred to as executing, this part of project management lasts a long time, but it boils down to following the plan. As the project manager, your job is to keep the project team working on the right things at the right times.

• Keeping things under control. In a perfect world, performing the project would be enough, because things would always run according to plan. But because the world isn’t perfect, project managers have to monitor projects to see whether they’re on schedule, within budget, and achieving their objectives. Whether someone gets sick, a storm washes out a bike path on the ride route, or your data center is plagued with locusts, something is bound to push your project off course. In the controlling phase, you measure project performance against the plan, decide what to do if the project is off track, make the necessary adjustments, and then measure again. Chapter 14 explains how to use Project 2013 to control things.

• Gaining closure. Like personal relationships, projects need closure. Before you can call a project complete, you have to tie up loose ends like closing out contracts, transitioning resources to their new assignments, and documenting the overall project performance (Printing Views to Report Project Information). The closing phase is when you ask for official acceptance that the project is complete—your sign that your job is done. Chapter 17 describes the information to collect in this phase and different ways to archive a project.

Figure 1-1. Planning isn’t a one-time event, because no project runs exactly according to plan. Whether changes, issues, or full-blown disasters arise, you regularly revisit and revise the plan.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE: Picking a Project-Management Methodology

Companies that perform project after project usually pick a project-management methodology, such as PRINCE2 or Agile, and stick with it. That way, all their projects follow approximately the same project-management processes. Teams learn what works and what doesn’t, and everyone learns what to do and expect.

The approach you choose depends a lot on the environment in which you work. Complex environments with large projects, widely distributed teams, or multiple vendors usually need a robust project-management methodology with formal, well-documented procedures, standardized forms and documents, and project-management software like Microsoft’s Enterprise Project Management Solutions to keep track of everything. Simpler, smaller projects would bog down with that kind of overhead but run just fine with a more informal approach.

This book introduces the basic steps of project management, which you can use as a starting point. If you want a ready-made methodology to adopt, check out the following resources:

• Many organizations have developed methodologies based on the project-management principles outlined in the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) Project Management Body of Knowledge (affectionately known as PMBOK).

• PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is a methodology used to manage government projects in the United Kingdom as well as private-sector projects around the world.

• Iterative and agile methodologies work well when the solution for the project isn’t clearly defined. You use iterations to gradually identify the solution as you work on the project.

• TenStep, Inc. offers a project-management approach that (predictably) takes 10 steps from start to finish. This approach can be adapted to projects large and small. If you register with the website www.tenstep.com (for free), you can mine a mother lode of additional project-management wisdom.

• Project Planning, Scheduling & Control by James P. Lewis (McGraw-Hill) bucks the trend in project-management books by providing an easy-to-read, and even amusing, description of one way to manage projects.

• A Management Framework for Project, Program, and Portfolio Integration by R. Max Wideman (Trafford Publishing) tries to simplify project management—and for the most part succeeds.