Many impressive ideas often fail not for insufficient funding but because of bad project management. Since good management is essential to the success of a business, it’s no surprise managers are the rock stars of the corporate world. A standard medium to large scale project demands experts from various fields. Maintaining an in-house team of experts is not very economical, most businesses therefore prefer to hire project management consultants to manage their projects.
Project management, in the simplest form, includes the use of managerial skills and strategies to ensure projects are completed to specification within their deadlines and without cost overruns. Managers and project management consultants ensure that the whole process is as efficient as possible. It’s their job to ensure assets are efficiently utilized, wastage is reduced, project is secured, and each and every thing works like a well oiled machine. A typical project management process involves the following steps.
Initiation: This step consists of outlining or initiating a fresh project. New project ideas mostly originate out of necessity. A project is created from scratch to fix a current unresolved problem. Once conceptualized a project heads to the planning stage.
Planning: It involves designing working methods to an issue. The planning stage demands brainstorming and prototyping. Brainstorms result in the generation of a variety of ideas, these ideas are then examined and enhanced to generate one of the most possible solution. When a solution is found, execution guidelines and protocols are set up for the next stage. Often project management consultants are employed to handle the design and planning stage.
Execution: Execution is the most involved stage in the whole project management process. It includes channeling and utilization of resources towards the realization of objectives set over the planning stages. Execution and resource allocation plans are developed during the planning stage itself.
Monitoring, feed back and completion: Monitoring goes hand in hand with execution. Issues that arise during execution are relayed back to planning and design teams for revision. The cycle continues until a satisfaction solution is reached and the project is completed successfully.
