Why use a Project Management method?
Project Management deals with planning, delegating, monitoring and controlling the project; in other words, the administration of the project. The role of the Project Manager is to achieve project objectives within the targets set for time, cost, quality, scope, benefits and risk or you can also say the Project Manager has to make sure the project monitors its return on investment and produces a usable product that provides benefits.
Let us look at some typical things that can go wrong in a project and why a Project Management Method in needed?: e.g. New House
- Individual subcontractor firms are used to do the different specialist work (heating, electricity, fittings, etc…).
- As you can imagine, these subcontractors may need to be managed.
Scenario 1: You find out just one week before the plumbers are due to arrive that they may be delayed for one month.
Result: Most of the planned work will be affected.
- It will be difficult to reschedule other contractors.
- You may still have to pay part of their costs (current contract conditions).
Scenario 2: During the installation of the new window frames, you may find that the allocated space is too small.
Result: Again, this may affect the rest of the project and throw it off track.
Here you can see that a person (i.e. a Project Manager) is needed to plan the work, monitor the work, do numerous checks and sign-offs, deal with risk, deal with issues as they arise, identify areas to cut costs, and so on.
Some other common project failures are:
- Insufficient product definitions at the start, resulting in the wrong product being developed.
- Lack of communication which is the major cause of all project failures
- Poor estimation of time and cost, which may cause the project to run out of money.
- Working on low priority features, which offer little value but some people do get excited about things that bring much value.
And so, I hope you see there is a need for a good Project Management method like PRINCE2®, AgilePM®, PRINCE2 Agile®, etc… Hope this short article answers the question: Why use a Project Management method?
Related Courses
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