The project determines a temporary task, dedicated to a particular goal. Let’s say, a goalkeeper prevents goals in the game of soccer. While dedicating his energy and skills, he tries to grab a victory. It defines his project.

The word ‘project’ may confuse with a routine chore. But, both terms differ. The project follows a specific sequence of operations to achieve the goal, which effectuate project management. A team together follows a series of tasks.

In essence, the project management scales around initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing the work of a team for hitting a bull’s eye, i.e. achieving a particular business goal. 

Core Components:

1.       Initiating: Client Eastwood explained the essence of the initiative in this sentence-Sometimes if you want to see a change for the better you have to take things into your own.

The initiating brings you close to unlocking opportunities.  It lets you start with defining objectives, scope, purposes and deliverables to be produced. Besides, you estimate the team-size, scope and resources for entering the next phase. These are what you need to initiate with.  

Basically, it is a cycle of these phases-Develop Case, Research, Set the Charter, Hire a Team, Arrange Infrastructure and Review.

2.       Planning:  

Alan Lakein signified it while saying, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

It is crucial to formally plan what to be delivered, how much will it cost, when will it be delivered and how will it be carried out. You have a policy or a set of guidelines to effectuate the project around.

Besides, premeditate the delivery time, turnaround time, accountability and responsibilities. It defines delivery plan, which move around Why, What, How, Who, When, How Much and Where.

While doing so, challenges will coin at the back of your mind. Come up with a game plan to   counter them.

3.       Executing: As per Thomas Edison, “Vision without execution is delusion.”            

A project remains a mere wish unless you start executing what you have thought. This phase puts prior phases into action. Simply say, what you have projected, kick-start and deliver anticipated results/outputs. In short, project execution means to get things done while applying most resources.        

The project manager sequentially follows these elements to implement his plan:

·         Conduct Project Execution, which scales around conducting meetings and formally define how to change, orient new team, review documents and observe the status of the goal.

·         Manage Project Execution, which ensures managing every aspect of the project plan correctly and on-time.  

·         Manage Cost, Scope, Schedule and Quality to manage challenges and changes that come the way to the project scope, schedule, quality and control costing.

·         Monitor and Control Risks, which let you to interact with new responses that are translated into new business intelligence/strategies.

·         Gain Project Acceptance, which determines whether or not all outputs have been gone through testing funnel, qualified for acceptance and transitioned to the expected target audience/beneficiaries. 

Here are the project execution strategies to put your plan into action: Hire skills, get buy-in. appointment team, monitor tasks, attend leads, adapt changes, reward team, develop team spirit and learn from failure.

4.       Monitoring & Controlling: These are the trackers to tap on the actual performance with respect to the planned project management activities. Each and every stage of the project requires proper monitoring and controlling. This is how the quality outshines and your project bags recommendations & recognition.

Mostly, this phase directs to these proceedings:

·         Request for changes through  CAPA (Correct and Preventive Actions)

·         Editing in the project management plan

·         Upgrading project documents

Long turnaround time, exceeding expected operating cost and assessing customer care are a few examples where monitoring and controlling can prove a breakthrough. The project manager, upon analyzing the downsides, takes all requisite measures to identify project performance at regular intervals.

These analytics techniques can aggressively make this phase significant:

·         Regression Analysis

·         Grouping Methods

·         Casual Analysis

·         Root Cause Analysis

·         Forecasting Method

·         Failure Mode & Effect Analysis

·         Reserve Analysis

·         Trend Analysis

·         Earned Value Analysis

·         Variance Analysis

5.       Closing: What if adverse and unfavourable scenarios occur?

The closing phase answers this question in the project management. It is similar to meeting minutes, which sum up the pan meeting in a few points. Likewise, this phase emphasizes on recording, maintaining and reusing the lessons learned from the project. The teams are left with a plenty of knowledge about challenges and ways to sail across them.

This is how such learning is secured to execute in the future, which eventually will cut short the turnaround time and infuse quality in work.

These are a few processes to carry out closing of the project management:

·         Confirming completion

·         Completing procurements

·         Gaining approvals

·         Reporting at end

·         Indexing & archiving

·         Updating lessons learnt

·         Delivery & release resources