Project Management - Part III

 

Project resource management requires you to know and work with the bandwidth of your team. Identify their individual strengths, weaknesses, and synergy with other team members. It all comes back to that part about helping team members grow.

Project communications management is making sure everyone involved is informed on changes, updates and issues at the right time. A breakdown in communications can be problematic, so it’s not an area where you want to be weak.

Project risk management can flag upcoming problems and equip you with the means to work around and through them, rather than causing major complications.

Project procurement management is about making sure you have the outside resources and materials when you need them, working with suppliers, vendors, other contractors, and specialized personnel

Stakeholder project management is about identifying all those that have a vested interest in the project outside of those directly working on the project. These stakeholders are usually the ones who have authorized or funded the project.

It is true that you can work as a project manager without having any knowledge of the phases of a project or the ten knowledge areas of the project.  However, at the conclusion of your first project you will intuitively know about all of this, even though you may not be aware of the specific terms that you have learned in these three project management postings.

Having this knowledge upfront is simply a shortcut but in no way any kind of indication that you cannot be a project manager without this knowledge.

My knowledge of project management came from my MBA training and actually working on numerous projects after graduation.

I found out on my own that I needed to keep a detailed communications notebook of all communications, including making notes about my telephone calls, always making sure I had the names of everyone involved on the call.

Through experience, I learned to lay out an overall map of the project (Project Scope) to make sure I fully understood what needed to take place from beginning to end.  Through this scope, I was able to anticipate what personnel/supplies that I needed when and when I would have a short fall of people and needed to hire others.

Through experience, I learned what tasks needed to be done when or what tasks needed to be done before another one could start, as well as what tasks could be done simultaneously to reduce time and costs.

The ultimate goal of a project manager is to have the project be completed ON TIME and UNDER BUDGET with 100% of the quality mandated by the Stakeholder or project originator.  Understanding project management through the PMBOK and PMP certification is not required but is damn helpful with that process.