Project management is the process of leading the work of a team of people to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. Project management is the use of specific knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to deliver something of value to people. A project may be the construction of a building, software development, disaster relief efforts, expansion of a company’s market into a new geographic zone and so on. Projects are temporary, time-limited efforts to create value. Projects consist of tasks, activities, and deliverables that must be structured and executed carefully to achieve a desired outcome.

All projects have a beginning and an end. They have a team, a budget, a schedule, and a set of expectations the team needs to meet.

A project is a carefully defined endeavor that has a specific start and completion date undertaken to produce results according to the project’s objectives. Projects use resources such as people’s time and energy, money, materials, physical space and information. In the planning of a project, you will be asking yourself who is going to do what, when, where, how and why? To put it a different way, the three elements of project planning are the product (beneficial results), the schedule (start and end dates) and the resources. There are two inputs, time and money that need to be efficiently transformed into benefits in such a way that the benefits are maximized and the inputs are minimized.

The Project Management Institute has published a set of standards called the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK).

Project Management concepts are used extensively in Software Engineering.

Project Management

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. The success of a project is often defined as having completed the work on time and on budget.  The challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while adhering to the project constraints of scope, time and budget. The other challenge is to optimize the allocation and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives. A major component of scope is the quality of the final product. The amount of time put into individual tasks determines the overall quality of the project. Some tasks may require a given amount of time to complete adequately, but given more time could be completed exceptionally. Since it is not realistic, in our world of limited resources, to expect the very best quality product for the lowest price completed in the shortest amount of time, it is necessary to set priorities in these three areas.

Process

A process is not a project. A process is a series of routine steps. A process is a permanent or semi-permanent functional work to repetitively produce the same product or service. Processes do not have end dates, whereas projects do. A project may exist who’s purpose is to develop a new process to achieve a certain function. For example, you may have the project of implementing a computer software application that will change the process of entering financial information into the computer.

Program

A program is not a project. A program is a set of activities performed towards achieving a long-term goal. Since programs never completely achieve their goal or goals, they too do not have end dates, and therefore are not projects. There may be one or more projects implemented as part of a long-term program to achieve some sort of educational goal, for example.

Time, Cost and Quality

A project is defined as an endeavor (cost) that has a start and end date (time) to produce results (quality) according to objectives. We all want good results quickly at a minimum cost. In other words, we all want it good fast and cheap but since we live in a world of limited resources, we will need to set priorities in these three areas. If you consistently tried to be the best at all three, you may eventually go out of business. Assuming that you can’t have all three, you might decide to focus on two of them and let the third one be satisfactory. This isn't to say that you should strive for excellence in all that you do. These three factors are often thought of an drawn as a triangle. The triangle shows each side as one of the three factors. The longer the side the higher the priority. When you change the length of one side, at least one other side’s length is affected.

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