What is Project Management? A Complete Guide

What is project management?

Project management is the process of planning, organizing, and overseeing the completion of the specific progress. It involves defining a clear scope and planned constraints, creating a detailed plan, allocating resources, and managing work to ensure the project meets its goals within the set timeframe and budget.

Various tasks that you may already carry out, including scheduling, budgeting, risk management, and quality control, all fall under the scope of project management.

There are several methodologies that people traditionally use to manage projects. These methodologies, such as agile or waterfall, provide different frameworks for approaching tasks and timelines. To implement these different frameworks, project managers use different tools that ensure the success of a project. They plan, track, collaborate, and automate, all the while making adjustments as needed to address any issues that may arise.

Ultimately, project management is about ensuring that a project is completed within the given constraints.

So, what is a project?

The diary that's waiting to be filled, the blank canvas that needs some color, the empty land that requires a building; they are all projects if you set your mind to complete them within a particular time frame.

A project can be any activity that has a deadline. To make it more clear, a project can be a goal, a resolution, a task, or simply something that you want to do in order to produce a certain result.

Terms to watch out for:

Planned constraints: Let's say you're an artist with a goal of finishing a painting on a blank canvas. If you decide to finish the painting within a week using only readily available art supplies, these limitations that you set are considered the project's planned constraints.

Scope: Scope exclusively encompasses the work you do to produce the planned outcome for your project. For instance, in the artist example, while painting on the blank canvas falls under the scope, the additional actions of displaying it in art exhibitions and putting it up for auction exceed the scope of the current project.

Check out the video below for a quick understanding of what is project management.

Why is project management important?

There are several benefits to project management, and chief among them is the simple fact that your chances of succeeding in your projects are greatly improved.

Projects are notorious for not meeting their original goals, and project management helps improve these conditions. Some key benefits are:

• Clear focus and goals

  Project management helps in defining the project's end goal, objectives, scope, and constraints. Everyone involved must clearly understand the goal to align all efforts toward the project's success.

• Improved efficiency and productivity

  By providing a system for organizing tasks, setting priorities, and establishing timelines, project management ensures that resources are used effectively. This naturally reduces duplicated efforts and improves collaboration and productivity, allowing teams to achieve more in less time, with fewer resources.

• Better risk management

  Project management, if done correctly, helps teams identify potential risk areas early on. Developing effective strategies to take care of these risk areas ensures minimal disruption in achieving the end goal. This also helps in avoiding potential pitfalls, significantly reducing the risk of delays, budget overruns, or worse, project failure.

• Higher quality outcomes

  Project management emphasizes tracking and quality control throughout the project's lifecycle. By setting quality standards, failure metrics, and conducting regular reviews, teams can produce final deliverables that meet or exceed expectations.

• Improved stakeholder satisfaction

  As a tool that ensures teams deliver projects on time, within budget, and to the required quality standards, project management significantly improves the satisfaction of all stakeholders involved. There's little frustration at the team level due to effective work allocation, management sees minimal budget overruns, and clients are delighted with the high-quality outcomes.

• Working better, together

  When it comes to managing projects, many people from different teams are often involved. Good communication and relationships between teams can greatly improve productivity and keep projects on track. With project management, this becomes a priority instead of a courtesy, leading to a positive culture shift in the organization.

• Getting the best out of your resources

  Any resource that you have—an employee, an asset, or work time—needs to be used properly to get the best value. Proper project management ensures that no resource is wasted. A successful project is not just about getting the right work done on time, but also ensuring that the people involved feel engaged and motivated. This means there's no imbalance one way or another; no single person is overworked or underworked, and no material resource is over or underutilized.

• Driving engagement

  The relationship with stakeholders is what holds the entire project in balance. Some may want to be kept in the loop for every single change, while others may just want an occasional status update. It's all in the details, which project management accommodates, allowing teams to engage with all their stakeholders in the right way.

Why do businesses need project management?

Let's say a software company is launching a new product. Without proper project management, there's a lot of room for chaos. Tasks might overlap, deadlines could be missed, and more importantly, costs might spiral out of control. Project management introduces organization and efficiency by providing a clear plan, set roles, and concrete deadlines. This ensures that everyone on the project team knows what to do and when to do it.

Planning ahead and monitoring progress through project management systems ensures teams can quickly catch any budget overruns or poor utilization of resources. They can focus on delivering a great product without having to fight fires all the time. Of course, if things go wrong, teams have the tools they need to ensure minimal disruptions.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, project management improves communication and collaboration between all stakeholders. Regular updates, progress reports, and meetings keep everyone aware of exactly what's going on. This collaborative environment ensures that everyone's aligned and working towards a common goal, which vastly improves the chances of a successful product launch.

While this example applies to a product launch, the same benefits of a robust project management system can be applied to any business process that you can think of—recruiting talent, running marketing campaigns, or even upskilling human resources can be significantly optimized!

What are the four types of project management?

As mentioned earlier, there are different methodologies that project managers adopt to ensure the success of a project. Out of these many different methodologies, the following four types of project management are the most commonplace:

• Waterfall project management

  Also known as the "traditional project management", waterfall methodology is the most common type of project management in use. Project managers deploying a waterfall project tend to break the project down sequentially, from start to finish. In other words, the project goes through set phases or stages in a sequential manner.

  For instance, in the case of a software company, these phases may include requirement gathering, planning, design, development, testing, and deployment. Before moving on to a subsequent phase, the previous phase must be fully completed. Waterfall is best suited for projects with well-defined requirements and a clear path from start to finish.

• Agile project management

  Agile is a flexible, iterative approach that focuses on continuous iterations and improvements based on feedback. Projects are divided into small chunks, with each of these chunks lasting from two to four weeks. At the end of each of these chunks, an update is delivered, allowing for feedback and further improvement.

• Scrum project management

  Scrum is a subset of the agile methodology, where the duration of each chunk of work is fixed. These fixed "sprints" usually last two weeks. Scrum places importance on roles like scrum master, product owner, and the dev team, along with events like daily stand-ups, sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives. Scrum is best for teams that need a little bit of structure and a whole lot of flexibility to manage rapidly changing requirements.

• Kanban project management

  Kanban, another child of the agile methodology, focuses on continuous delivery and efficiency. It uses a board, typically divided into columns, which represents the different stages of workflow to monitor work items and their progress. Each work item is represented by a card that moves through the columns from start to completion. The main focus of Kanban is to limit the number of items in the work in progress (WIP) stage to reduce bottlenecks. Kanban is perfect for organizations and projects that thrive in a highly flexible environment.

Areas within project management

There are 10 key knowledge areas within project management, as defined by the Project Management Institute. The body authored a book called Project Management Book of Knowledge, which goes into each of these knowledge areas in detail.

• Project integration management

  Project integration management is an area within project management that ensures all project elements are effectively coordinated. Starting with developing a project charter (and in the process, formally authorizing the project), project integration management includes activities like creating a detailed project management plan, execution, monitoring, control, and closure processes.

  Project integration management also involves overseeing tasks, managing resources, and even implementing necessary changes. It also involves using project knowledge effectively and sharing information, as well as monitoring and controlling project work to stay on track with goals.

• Project scope management

  Project scope management ensures that a project includes all—and only—the work that's required for project success. Defining and controlling what falls within and outside the scope of the project is crucial here.

  The key activities in project scope management include scope management, requirement gathering, scope defining, and most importantly, creating a work breakdown structure (WBS). Project scope management also ensures that the scope is verified with the stakeholders to prevent and scope creep.

• Project time management

  Project time management involves effectively managing and controlling the schedule of the project to ensure timely completion. It includes activities like defining project activities, sequencing them logically, estimating accurate duration, developing a project schedule, and monitoring and controlling progress to adhere to the timeline.

  The main goal is to prevent delays and ensure that resources are allocated efficiently.

• Project cost management

  All activities like cost estimation, budgeting, and cost control fall under project cost management, which plays a significant role throughout the lifetime of the project.

  It starts with an cost estimation of resources needed for the project, including factors like labor, materials, equipment, and overheads. Once the estimates are created, a project budget is developed to allocate funds efficiently. Throughout the life of the project, costs are constantly monitored and controlled to ensure minimal overruns.

• Project quality management

  Every deliverable of a project has to meet the determined standards and requirements, and that's where project quality management comes in. Processes like defining quality requirements, planning to achieve the required quality, and implementing necessary processes and controls to ensure that the deliverables meet the determined standards.

  This includes activities like identifying quality standards, establishing quality metrics, and creating thorough quality management plans. During any stage of the project's lifecycle, if defects or deviations are found from the preset standards, corrective measures are immediately taken to address them. Naturally, this helps increase customer satisfaction, reduces rework, and significantly contributes to the overall success of the project.

• Project human resource management

  People are arguably the most important component of a successful project. Project human resource management talks about effectively managing the people involved in a project so that each individual contribution leads to successful project outcomes.

  Processes like acquiring, developing, and managing the project team form the core of project human resource management. Identifying roles and responsibilities, recruiting and assigning team members with the adequate skills, and providing people with the training and support that they need to succeed all fall under Project Human Resource Management.

• Project communication management

  Collaboration and communication—the two key components of project success—fall under project communication management. Processes like identifying stakeholders' needs, timely and appropriate distribution of information, and planning communication management are part of this knowledge area.

  Effective communication management enables a clear, concise, and timely exchange of information. This is crucial for project coordination, decision-making, and stakeholder engagement, all of which are important elements of a successful project.

• Project risk management

  Project risk management focuses on identifying, analyzing, and responding to risks that could directly or indirectly impact the project. It involves systematically assessing internal and external risks for the project while developing strategies to mitigate them effectively.

  Project risk management helps project teams anticipate and mitigate potential threats while capitalizing on opportunities to enhance project success. It allows organizations to proactively address uncertainties and adapt to changing conditions, ultimately minimizing project disruptions and moving the teams closer to completing their objectives.

• Project procurement management

  Project procurement management ensures that project teams have access to the necessary resources and expertise to execute the project successfully.

• Project stakeholder management

  Project stakeholder management involves identifying, engaging, and managing individuals or groups who have an interest in or are affected by the project.

  Effective stakeholder management helps build support for the project, mitigate risks, and ensure alignment with stakeholder interests and objectives.

Who is using project management?

Project management is utilized across a wide range of industries and sectors by various professionals to ensure project success. Here are some key groups of people that commonly utilize project management.

• Project managers are professionals that are specifically trained in managing projects.
• Executives and senior management utilize project management to oversee strategic initiatives, ensure alignment with business goals, and make informed decisions.
• Team members that are assigned to project tasks are required to coordinate their efforts and communicate progress.
• Clients and other stakeholders who benefit from project success need to stay informed about the project process and contribute input as required.

Eight tips for successful project management

Successful project management is an art that involves a mix of strategic planning, communication, and precise execution. Here are eight tips that will help you ensure project success.

• Define clear objectives: Establish clear, attainable goals and objectives from the outset. Even before starting on anything else, ensure that all the involved stakeholders understand and, more importantly, agree on what success looks like for the project.

• Develop a detailed plan: A comprehensive project plan is an absolute necessity for project success. This should not only cover macros like milestones and budgets but should also take into account tasks, subtasks, timelines, and workload management.

• Effective communication: Open and transparent communication is crucial for project success. Be it in the form of regular updates, meetings, chat messages, emails, or even updating your Zoho Projects dashboards, make sure to keep everyone informed.

• Managing risks: No project can exist without risks. Sometimes things can go wrong, and it's necessary to identify and manage these risks proactively. Continuous monitoring of risks throughout the lifecycle of the project will go a long way toward project success.

• Efficient allocation of resources: Make sure you have the right people, tools, and materials in place to execute the project. Use tools like the workload reports in Zoho Projects to utilize your resources optimally.

• Monitor progress regularly: Keep track of project performance against the plan. Use KPIs, regular status reports, and the planned vs. actual reports to identify deviations and make prompt corrections.

• Engage stakeholders: Involve the stakeholders actively throughout the project lifecycle. Put yourselves in their shoes and understand what they need. Make sure that their feedback is considered during the decision-making process.

• Team environment, the secret sauce of success: Promote teamwork and collaboration among project members. Encourage open communication, recognize achievements, and address conflicts immediately to maintain a productive work environment. While the default discuss module should be more than enough for most cases, you can also make use of Zoho Projects' integration with Zoho Cliq, Microsoft Teams, or Slack to optimally coordinate your team.

What tools are used in project management?

Project management tools help plan, execute, and monitor projects efficiently. Here are some commonly used tools in project management.

• Gantt charts: Visualize the project schedule, tasks, duration, and dependencies with the help of Gantt charts. They help in tracking progress and ensuring the project stays on schedule.

• Project management software: Tools like Zoho Projects exist to make the lives of project managers across the world easier. The software enables better task management, collaboration, and progress tracking.

• Work breakdown structure: WBS is a hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work to accomplish project objectives. In Zoho Projects, the hierarchy is as follows:

  Projects -> Milestones -> Task Lists -> Tasks -> Subtasks

• Kanban boards: Kanban boards help you visualize the work flow and task statuses at a glance.

• Communication tools: Communication tools like Zoho Cliq, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoho Meeting help ensure that all the stakeholders are on the same page.

• Dashboards and reporting tools: Visual dashboards and reporting tools are a must for obtaining digestible information about your project.