Your Project Management Coach: Best Practices for Managing Projects in the Real World

Chapter 2

Getting to Know Project Management

You have projects to do and you want to complete them successfully — without making yourself or the people on your team miserable. Projects can present challenges. They may be incredibly complex or they might have to be finished in record time or with only a tiny budget. At the same time, customers could change their minds or not know exactly what they want to begin with.

To conquer the challenges your projects face and achieve the desired results, you and the people on your team have to work smart. That's what project management is all about. What you do to manage projects should help you achieve the results the project is supposed to deliver or prevent problems that get in the way. If it doesn't, you shouldn't waste time or resources on it.

Getting projects done right boils down to knowing what you're trying to do, figuring out how you're going to do it, and then making sure you did it. This chapter introduces you to the five project management processes that help you address those areas. You'll also learn about several areas of expertise a project manager needs to master to make things happen the way they're supposed to.

Project management isn't one size fits all. You can use different approaches depending on the project size and complexity, and how clear the solution is, how tough your constraints are, and so on. In this chapter, you meet a few different methodologies and learn the pros and cons of each one.

Project managers have ...