Part 1: Understanding project management
project
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What is project management, what is the important terminology, and what are the different types of projects that may exist?
Life is complicated and busy! Your education, job, social and personal life all factor into things that take up your time. Project management provides you with the skills and techniques to help you manage your projects as well as other aspects of your life. Project management skills can also help to reduce the stress associated with running a project!
Project Management: The practice of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time.
Project management should not be considered as “extra work”. The goal of project management is to increase the likelihood of project success by improving the clarity of the project. In the grand scheme of things, the effort and time you spend on project management reduces the work that would have existed without it. Proper project management should pay off many times over.
Stressed young girl stands in front of a pie chart grabbing her hair. There’s three pieces of paper flying around her, two in the air above her head and one falling just past her shoulder.
The pie chart is full with the following, from biggest piece to smallest: Sleep, work, classes, TA-ship, chores, commute, and course work. Four additional pie chart slices are around the pie chart: Hobbies, fitness, self-care and socializing. These do not fit in the pie chart.
- Project management aims to reduce reactive project management and improve our proactive management of projects. You can click on the below tabs to learn more about each project management type.
Instructions: Click on the tabs below to learn more about reactive versus proactive project management styles.
Reactive project management styles are used to react to problems as they arise. This style can come with many problems such as: time loss, communication issues (not informed or not uniform decisions), emotions get involved, higher costs. This style can be helpful in situations where crisis management is required, such as emergencies.
Importance of project management
The skills and tools of project management are useful beyond just one project type. Project management can be applied to every aspect of your life including school, work, and your personal life. It is an important, desirable, and marketable skill!
In addition, project management is essential to minimize the potential for project failure!
At the top of the image is the text “A lot of projects fail!”. Underneath the text is a light blue dotted line that separates the upper heading from the rest of the graphic.
There is a pi chart that is split into three pieces. The pi chart represents the success of US projects that have been tracked across multiple industries from 2009. The data is collected by the Standish Group in their 2009 CHAOS report.
32% of the chart is green and represents the percentage of projects that were successful. Text beside the green pie piece defines a successful project as “delivered on time, on budget, and with the desired features/functions”.
44% of the chart is yellow and represents the percentage of projects that were challenged. Text beside the yellow pie piece defines a challenged project as “late, overbudget, and/or with less than the required features/functions”.
The final piece of the chart is 24% and is red to represent the percentage of projects that failed completely. Text beside the red pie piece defines a failed project as “cancelled or not delivered”.
Most projects do not proceed as expected. A 2009 study (the CHAOS report by The Standish Group) found that only 32% of the projects that they looked at were successful. For this report, a successful project was one that was delivered on time, on budget, and with the desired features and functions. The rest of the projects that were part of this study were either challenged (late, overbudget, or had less than the required features/functions) or failed completely.
These project challenges and failures cost time and money. For example, the IT industry in the United States spends more than $250 Billion dollars each year on over 175,000 different projects. Assuming each project receives equal funding – if only 32% of these projects are successful, then over $170 Billion dollars is wasted each year on challenged and failed projects.
Common causes of failure include unclear goals, no metrics for tracking success, and poor communication. Every project has the potential to fail, especially since encountering challenges and problems during a is natural. However, proper project management provides you with tools that can help increase the odds of success by establishing clear accountabilities, defining objectives and outcomes, establishing scope, and monitoring project activities.
Learning activity 1: Causes of failure
Watch the video and identify the root cause of failure. Provide one or two examples of how project failure could be avoided.
Share your thoughts in Discord and write your answer.
Throughout this module, you will learn and improve project management tools and skills to identify potential causes of failure, address them, and subsequently increase our chances of the project’s success. Furthermore, you will learn many skills and techniques to prevent the common causes of failure from occurring at all.
What is a project?
Before we can discuss the intricacies of project management, let’s define what a project is.
Projects are unique and temporary sets of activities; they have a definite beginning and end. Therefore, projects are completed when the project’s goals are achieved OR when the project is no longer viable.
A project progresses in phases:
Instructions: The following figure shows three phases of a project. Click on each [+] icon to learn more about each part.
A line graph with “project progress” increasing along the x axis and “your effort” increasing along the y axis. The graph area is broken into three sections and divided by three vertical blue dotted lines. The first section is 1/4 of the entire graph width and represents the “initiation and planning” phase. The second section is to the right of the first and is 1/2 of the entire graph width representing the “execution of tasks and objectives” phase. The final section is to the right of the second and is the final 1/4 of the graph width representing the “project closure” phase.
The line that is drawn on the graph starts near the graph origin and increases on a 45 degree angle to near the top of the graph height slightly after the start of the second phase (execution of tasks and objectives). The line remains near the top of the graph until near the end of the second phase and then decreases on a 45 degree angle through the project closure phase until the line is near the end of the x axis and near the bottom of the y axis.
The graph represents the increasing effort as you move from initiation and planning into the execution phase, then the decreasing effort as you move from execution to project closure.
The project goals are known as deliverables (e.g., Thesis introduction section, an abstract for a conference, your portion of a group project) and are determined during the initial phases of project planning.
In the execution phase, the project plan is put into motion and tasks are completed. This is the longest phase of a project and communication is KEY to ensuring that the project remains as close to on schedule and as close to the original plan as possible.
In the closure phase documentation is completed and the deliverables are provided to the stakeholders. In this phase it is also important to reflect on lessons learned from the project to provide wisdom for future project teams.
A line graph with “project progress” increasing along the x axis and “your effort” increasing along the y axis. The graph area is broken into three sections and divided by three vertical blue dotted lines. The first section is 1/4 of the entire graph width and represents the “initiation and planning” phase. The second section is to the right of the first and is 1/2 of the entire graph width representing the “execution of tasks and objectives” phase. The final section is to the right of the second and is the final 1/4 of the graph width representing the “project closure” phase.
The line that is drawn on the graph starts near the graph origin and increases on a 45 degree angle to near the top of the graph height slightly after the start of the second phase (execution of tasks and objectives). The line remains near the top of the graph until near the end of the second phase and then decreases on a 45 degree angle through the project closure phase until the line is near the end of the x axis and near the bottom of the y axis.
The graph represents the increasing effort as you move from initiation and planning into the execution phase, then the decreasing effort as you move from execution to project closure.
A successful project meets or exceeds the expectations of the stakeholders – people with an interest or concern in the project. For example, stakeholders for your thesis may include yourself, your supervisor, your committee members, and some members of your research team.
Depending on the project and your role in the project, managing the connections and relationships between individual stakeholders may be vital to the project’s success. This management involves a sophisticated skill set that requires knowledge of managing conflicts, negotiation, and other interpersonal skills. You can refer to the “Navigating difficult conversations” module to learn more about these skills.
Examples of projects
Here are two projects and some information about them. Remember that these are just examples and depending on the exact nature of your project the level of detail and information may change!
Wedding
Poster presentation for a conference
Research as a project
A common type of project you will encounter during your graduate school career is a research project, which may include your thesis and other research projects. Like the other examples we discussed, research projects have a timeline, a goal, deliverables, and stakeholders.
We can use project management to ensure a research project’s success.
Source: Image by wayhomestudio
As previously discussed, the first phase of a project is the “Initiation and Planning” phase. How you plan a project depends on the project type. The most common type of project is a progressive elaboration project; this type adds details to the plan as they become available.
Progressive elaboration projects can be further broken down into two common types:
- Rolling wave planning
- Stage-gating
You can learn more about these two types of projects below.
Source: Image by katemangostar
- Short-term plan is defined with great detail.
- Long-term plan is defined as detailed and accurately as possible, but as information is gathered the plan becomes more detailed.
- Example: To move into and decorate your new house, you may be able to plan in great detail the move itself and where you may like all your current furniture. However, until you move everything in and see everything in the space, you may not be able to plan out what new furniture you need or where to put your decorations.
- Important decisions are built into various points throughout the project.
- Makes use of pass/recycle/hold/stop decisions at critical points and only stages that “pass” can continue forward in the project.
- Example: To get a degree, you must pass a prerequisite course for some classes in order to continue onwards to more advanced courses.
Knowing your project type helps you plan.