Project Management For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Project Management: The Key to Achieving Results

In This Chapter

• Distinguishing projects

• Breaking down project management

• Coming to grips with the project manager's role

• Cycling through the phases of a project

• Eyeing potential problems with your project

• Examining the requirements for project success

Successful organizations create projects that produce desired results in established time frames with assigned resources. As a result, businesses are increasingly driven to find individuals who can excel in this project‐oriented environment.

Because you're reading this book, chances are good that you've been asked to manage a project. So, hang on tight — you're going to need a new set of skills and techniques to steer that project to successful completion. But not to worry! This chapter gets you off to a smooth start by showing you what projects and project management really are and helping you separate projects from nonproject assignments. The chapter also offers the rationale for why projects succeed or fail and gets you into the project‐management mindset.

What Exactly Is a Project?

No matter what your job, you handle a myriad of assignments every day: prepare a memo, hold a meeting, design a sales campaign, or move to new offices. Or maybe your day sounds more like this: make the information systems more user‐friendly, develop a research compound in the laboratory, or improve the organization's public image. Not all of these assignments are projects. How can you tell which ones ...