I came across many people pursuing implementation of projects!
They often get confused about Project v/s Project Management.
It’s quite obvious for me and those who have great ideas and urge to do something new, about what is that we expect as outcome of a project. What and why part of the project are clear however how part is left to adhoc methods / approaches to the execution of the project. Most of the time developers in IT think about getting down to coding right away or start brain storming on the solutions etc.They miss out totally on how to implement the projects with industry best practices, norms so that project outcomes are achieved within time, budget, quality and stakeholders expectations.
So, when we think about project, it’s all about the great purpose for the project, great benefits to stakeholders that we want to achieve. We are envisioning, planning, implementing and delivering the outcomes in any project.
When I ask someone, hey! explain me about how you managed the project, I get to listen a cluttered list of technical features of the project deliverable rather than on how the project was accomplished!
Ex: We solved the problem with this solution and this needed to perform surveys, analysis, development of the solution, future prospects etc. etc.
I realize that not that everyone understands on what is project management and how you can adopt it for improving success factors with project outcomes.
There is a urgent need for everyone who undertakes projects, to understand what is project management and how it needs to be adopted as strategy.
Project management is a strategy to achieve success and for maximizing the probability to succeed in all endeavors of undertaking a project implementation!
Excelling in adoption of project management practices improves the excellence of project outcomes!
One need to think of it as a framework which can guide you on how you can structure / organize the entire list of activities to ensure that you do rights things on right time with right resources and keep all stakeholder level interactions alive. In PMI recommended way, you need to perform Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Controlling, Closing processes that enables you to graduate an idea from concept to reality.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel on the project management best practices, as PMI (www.pmi.org) provides the framework for project, program and portfolio management. What you need to do is adopt this for your project/program/portfolio.
So, my recommendation is that to keep project management and product/outcome management as two separate focus areas whenever we want to achieve something very big and realize value for the stakeholders!
I will come back with more thoughts on this subject soon!
Warm Regards
Rajarama Rao Bannengala
Founder and MD
ProPMO Services Private Limited
