Day: October 24, 2021

Summary

Business managers have three skills to learn:

1. How to find things. For example, they can find a good location for a shopping center: there are lots of customers near there, the rents are cheap, and there are plenty of empty buildings.
2. How to deal with other people. For example, finding the right online employee management software to guide them in decision making.
3. How to deal with change. For example, they can anticipate likely changes in their market, respond to those changes, and make money from them. But it is difficult to predict which changes will happen, and when.

What you need to know

You may be thinking, "I want to become a manager, so why should I care about what smart managers do?" Well, becoming a manager is risky. And being smart—being as smart as the most successful managers—is the best insurance against being riskily wrong. There are two ways to become a good manager. The first is to learn by imitation. The second way is to engineer your own path.

The engineering path is exemplified by Steve Jobs. The engineering path begins with the recognition that every manager is his own worst enemy. Steve Jobs might have found a better engineer, but being an engineer himself, he knew that was impossible. Instead, he invented his own management style: management by shooting.

The engineering path begins by identifying the obstacles in the way. This often means asking a question like "Whose job is it?" and realizing that the answer is "Yours." And then, armed with that answer, the engineer must ask "How am I going to do this?" And the question is hard to answer, because the answer depends on problems you can't solve. The best strategy is to start by coming up with some vague ideas, and then to try to develop them a little at a time. This attitude is called "Doing Nothing." It is also called "developing a framework."

Then, when the framework is ready, it's time to build something small. But be careful. Don't start too big. If you start too big, you will fail. Steve Jobs was famous for saying "Appreciate the failing faster," but what he said was "Appreciate the fast failing." The faster failing is the failing you can recognize sooner.

The world is full of people who are really good at something and terrible at everything else. They are often tempted to spend all their time doing their thing and neglect everything else. Some do this because they love it, some because they fear they will lose it, and others both. The result is always the same: they achieve some measure of success with the thing that they are good at, but at the cost of not being good at anything else.

Successful managers are good at everything. They have to be. They manage a whole company, and their success depends on managing the company well. And their manager's job is to make sure that everything that is done is right. When things are done right, management is easier than when they aren't. When they are not, it is easy. And management requires overseeing the work of many people, and those people depend on their manager's understanding of many subjects.

Make smart decisions in business

Let’s start with the basics. A business manager needs to be able to make smart business decisions quickly. They need to know how to find customers, how to find locations, and how to find landlords that will rent them space. These are simple skills that can be learned by anyone. Management is not hard, it just requires common sense and experience. The best way to make the right decisions in all projects is to use online project management software for business and get your team to work towards common goals.

What makes a Manager successful?

You would think that managers who get promoted would have an easier time of their job, but the opposite seems to be true. They learn the ropes of management the hard way. Managers do need to learn how to manage, but they don't know how to do it. They have to figure it out for themselves. And since they depend on other people to tell them what to do, finding their own way is often hard.

Managers start out as workers, and they improve themselves by looking at other workers. They watch other people's behavior and try to figure out what made them successful. Then they try it out themselves. But managers aren't all the same. Some managers are natural born managers. They didn't have to learn how to manage. They learned it naturally. They didn't have to watch other people. They watched themselves.

These managers are relatively rare, but they are also probably smarter and more capable than average. Probably because they already have most of the skills they need. And probably because they know how to take advantage of those natural abilities. The trouble is, the rest of us aren't like that. Most of us have to watch other people to learn how to manage. And we have to watch other managers to learn how to manage better. And watching other people is risky. It's quite likely that watching other people will lead us down the wrong path.

We can learn some of the skills we need by reading books and watching others at work.  The best way is to utilize PMS tools for projects and make very detailed reports. But we probably learn more by doing it ourselves. The problem is that we have to risk making mistakes. We can't just go out and hire ourselves a manager. We have to figure it all out for ourselves.

That's why managers often end up making mistakes. They learn by watching others, but they find out the hard way that other people don't always behave the way we think they do. And often when they do, it's not because they are bad people. It's because they are not us.

What are the habits of successful managers?

Most managers already know what to do. They read strategy books. They listen to advice from other managers. They read management newsletters. They watch CNBC. They read business magazines. They go to management training seminars.

They think they do. But if they knew, they wouldn't be managers. Managers don't get to know. They manage. And they don't always know what to do. What makes managers different from everyone else is not what they know. It's what they don't know. What is a manager? A manager is someone who works for other people. Whatever other people need to be successful, they hire managers to do. But managers don't know everything they need to do those things.

Managers solve problems. Their job is to figure out the right way to do whatever it is they're hired to do. But they don't know which problems to solve. They don't know how to solve them, and they don't know how to solve them fast enough. And we don't know either. Managers get hired to solve problems, but they don't know what problems need solving. Why should they?

Managers get hired on the strength of their recommendations, not on the strength of their solutions. A manager's job is to make other people behave. But sometimes other people behave in ways the manager doesn't understand. Management is the art of getting other people to do their part of the job. The manager's job is not just to get the work done, it is to make sure the work is done in a way that's efficient, effective, and satisfies some vague, unarticulated sense of what's right.

A manager has to balance the interests of the people he works with against the interests of the people who hired him. And those interests are not as different as you'd think. An engineer will say that if you can't design a solution yourself, you're not an engineer.

Handling risks as a business manager

Business management is a career for risk takers. People who succeed in it are willing to take big chances. Most people are risk averse. They take small chances, especially where money is involved. The payoffs are often small, too, and sometimes negative. When managers make risky choices, the payoffs can come only from unexpected events, or from unexpected combinations of many events. For example, suppose you take a flyer on investing in a new technology. You believe that it will turn out better than you think. Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. But either way, you stand to make a lot.

This much is clear: the only way to make a flyer like this payoff is for you to risk a lot. But what are the chances? The odds are against you, of course. But you'll have a much better chance of succeeding if you spend enough time studying the odds. I don't mean count them; just study them. If you know the odds, you can calculate your chances, and you can decide whether the risk is worth the payoff. To understand risks in projects, business managers use online project management software and get real-time reports, which helps them to make informed decisions.

Success tips for project managers

Summary

We all know project management is important. But having a professional project manager can be very expensive. And the thought of spending lots of money to have someone help you plan a project makes you cringe. Many people think project management is all about money. It isn't. A good project manager is worth every penny. A good project manager knows what is important. They are skilled enough to understand the big picture, and confident enough to know what details matter. Often, a good project manager brings valuable skills that you can't get any other way.

What techniques do you need as a project manager?

Project management is a set of techniques for doing projects. It is a kind of engineering, with its own methods and terminology. A project manager has to understand project management. Project management is focused on one thing: creating a project. We all know what a project is: a thing that gets done. But often we don't understand what it takes to get it done. A project is a thing that requires some kind of organization. A project has human resources, material resources, and, most important of all, a schedule. A schedule defines how long a project will take. To achieve good results, you will need PMS tools for business and utilize all available resources.

A project requires a set of specific skills. A project manager needs to be able to estimate how long things will take, to estimate how much it will cost (to understand how much it will cost, the project manager needs to know the start date, the end date, and the team member costs), and to direct the work. But in order to understand a project, the project manager needs to understand a lot more. A project manager needs to know how to create an organization, how to hire people, how to train them, how to motivate them, how to get them to work together, how to keep a project on schedule, and how to keep people from getting in one another's way.

A project manager's job is to create a project. The project manager manages the project. The project manager's job is to make sure that the project gets done.  But a project manager's job is a lot more than that. The project manager's job is to understand the project. And in order to really understand the project, the project manager needs to understand a lot more.

What skills do project managers need?

Project management consists of a set of skills and attitudes required by anyone who undertakes a project. The first skill for project managers is being able to recognize problems. If you don't know what problems you're dealing with, you won't be able to fix them. Project management isn't difficult, but it does require a lot of training. The importance of project management has been driven home at almost every company I've worked at, and at nearly every company I've worked at, the training was horrible.

Some organizations hire project managers, which seems like a good idea, but the problem is that those project managers spend most of their time being told what to do. The managers have to defend their projects, so they have to explain why they need the money and who will do it. And most managers are not project managers. So they hire people who have project management experience, but those people have not been trained as project managers.

At companies where there is good project management, the people who get trained are the people who most need it. They are the people who are best at understanding what the project needs. So they are the ones most suited to being project managers. The people who are trained as project managers are the people who have the most trouble doing it. They need to learn to deal with people, and with computers, and with the equipment used in the project. They have to learn the rules of the game of management. So they don't get trained as project managers right away. Instead, they get trained as something else: either engineers, or as technicians, or as administrators. And as they learn that other stuff, they learn project management. The people who are trained as project managers are the ones who most need the training.

What should project managers expect at work?

A project consists of a set of activities, some of which have specific costs. The project may get done on time, on budget, and with the best results possible. Or it may be late, over budget, with results no one cares about. Using online project management software simplifies your job and makes you good at making everyone happy.

In some projects, only some of the activities have specific costs. For example, some projects have a fixed cost, such as a building, or the cost of materials. Others may have a variable cost, such as the cost of labor or the time. And still others may have both. Most projects have some combination of fixed and variable costs, and an activity with a cost that is fixed in one part of the project may have different costs in other parts of the project. For example, a building's cost may be fixed during construction, but the cost may be variable once the project is complete, or the cost of materials may be fixed during construction, but the cost may be variable once the project is complete, or the cost of materials may be fixed during construction, but the cost may be variable once the project is complete.

What else does a project manager need to know?

Project management is knowing what to do, when to do it, and who will do it.

Most projects fail for one reason: nobody does the thing they were supposed to do.

"Who" is the most important question. If "who" is not specified, there is chaos. That's why projects often get derailed by the guy who was supposed to do something.

"When" is another. If "when" is not specified, there is delay. Sometimes delay is OK. Sometimes it is not.

"What" is the most important part. If "what" is not specified, there is confusion.

"How" is less important.

"Who" and "when" are the most critical.

In real life, "who" is seldom specified. Even organizations and governments often don't know who is going to do what.

They just know they have to do something.

"When" is harder to specify.

"How" is less important.

Summary

The skills of project management are skills of communication, motivation, and leadership. Communication skills include being able to read people's emotional states, knowing what to say in appropriate situations, and knowing how to listen. Motivation includes being able to motivate other people to do what you want, and when. Leadership includes knowing how to organize and motivate people to get work done.

What project managers do

There are two kinds of project managers: those who want to be heroes, and those who want to be managers. The heroes are the first to try new and daring approaches, and to take risks that others wouldn't take. But they are also the first to quit. Management, on the other hand, knows when enough is enough. It has the stamina to stick with a project, even when the odds are against it.

The heroes and managers both need skills. The heroes need creativity, courage, and endurance. The managers need some of the same skills, plus some new ones. Creativity. A good project manager needs to come up with new and better ways to get things done. The tools of project management are familiar - plans, schedules, budgets, and so on. But they only work if you follow them. So a good project manager needs to be creative: to come up with new ways to organize people and resources and workloads.

Endurance. It isn't enough to come up with a new way to do something; you also have to be able to follow it through. A good project manager needs the endurance to follow through. Courage. A project manager has to stand up and admit when the plan is flawed. It's always easier to keep on doing something, especially when it has worked in the past. But a good project manager has the courage to admit when it is time to stop.

What it takes to become a good project manager

The most common mistake people make in project management is assuming that it will be easy. It may be true that project management is easy when the project is simple, obvious, small, and low-risk. But in others it is terribly hard. When a project is hard, people close to it feel like failures. They feel like they didn't do a good job. They feel like they didn't deserve the success. There's a high incidence of depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide among project managers. Project management is hard not because people are bad at it. It is hard because it is not easy.

Project management is hard because it requires making decisions that are hard. It requires that you take decisions over an uncertain future. It requires that you make tradeoffs in an uncertain world. It requires that you confront the uncertainties. Project management is hard because it requires that you make decisions that are not easy. It requires that you ignore or downplay the things that are easy to ignore or downplay. It requires you to make hard decisions. Best way to become good is to use online project management software tools in all projects, develop a trend and maximize on productivity.

Project management is hard because it is not about people. It is not about technology. It is not even about work. It is about hard decisions. Project management is hard because, ultimately, it is about why you started the project in the first place. The first thing to understand about project management is that it's not a skill. It is a mindset. And a mindset is something you are born with.

Project management is a complex skill that can be learned. But it's also one whose value is hard to quantify.

Project management is very simple, but difficult to do well. The essence of project management is that you have a bunch of things to be done, and someone you want those things done by. The project manager implements a plan designed to maximize the chance of having those things done by someone who will do them right. The project manager knows, for example, that hiring a decent carpenter will be cheaper than hiring a bad one, but hiring a mediocre carpenter will be worse than hiring a bad one. The project manager also knows that if two different projects have the same budget, the better project manager will get more work done in less time.

The project manager also knows, for example, that sending five extra people to a construction project will make the project more reliable. But sending one extra person to the construction project will make the project more reliable, too. The project manager knows, in other words, that there's no free lunch. Trying to save a dollar on a project by hiring cheap labor or skimping on materials not only reduces the project's value, but makes the project manager's job harder.

The project manager also knows, for example, that sending five extra people to a construction project will make the project more reliable. But sending one extra person to the construction project will make the project more reliable, too. The project manager knows, in other words, that there's no free lunch. Trying to save a dollar on a project by hiring cheap labor or skimping on materials not only reduces the project's value, but makes the project manager's job harder.

The project manager has to make many decisions like that. The project manager needs to know how to do research. The project manager needs to know how to find good contractors. The second thing to understand about project management is that there are important PMS tools to help you become good at it. There is just project management. The third thing to understand about project management is that it is hard. The fourth thing to understand about project management is that every project manager makes mistakes. The fifth thing to understand about project management is that you can't do anything about mistakes. The sixth thing to understand about project management is that every successful project manager has a number of them

Summary

Project management is a set of techniques for managing projects. Here are some common skills project managers must have.

1. Communication skills.
2. Time management.
3. Problem-solving skills.
4. Presentation skills.
5. Leadership.
6. Judgment.
7. Creativity.
8. Leadership.
9. Organizing.
10. Team skills.

Why you need Project management skills in business

Project management is a set of skills used by the project manager to plan, organize, manage, control, and coordinate the activities and resources needed to achieve specific project goals. The project manager must be aware of a variety of possible methods of project planning and scheduling.

The project manager's history may be included as part of the project history.  The project manager typically conducts meetings to develop the project plans, schedules, budgets, and to identify risks, issues, and opportunities.  The project manager is often required to develop project communication and documentation procedures.

The project manager's role is to develop and oversee all project phases and to oversee all project participants using the right PMS tools for business.  The project manager is accountable for project success, and is accountable for the project's cost, quality, and schedule.  The project manager is expected to make timely and accurate decisions.

The project manager typically chooses teams, assigns tasks, and coordinates efforts and progress.  The project manager develops and maintains a project plan, which includes all project tasks, work products, and deliverables.  The project manager typically manages the activities of the project.  The project manager is responsible for assigning resources, such as staff and subcontractors, and for coordinating their activities.

The project manager typically juggles many tasks simultaneously. Using online project management software comes in handy when handling multiple projects. The project manager works with team members to identify and resolve issues.  The project manager monitors the progress of team members, and adjusts project plans when necessary.  The project manager interviews team members to make sure they are fully engaged in the project. The project manager monitors progress toward project goals.  The project manager monitors activities, and determines if the team will be successful.  The project manager assesses project risks and issues.

How to succeed in Project management

For all the talk today about project management, there are lots of reasons it doesn't make sense as a discipline. For one thing, it's too complex to be managed by a single individual; it requires a large team with a division of labor. For another thing, the projects are so diverse that they can't be streamlined into a standard process; each project has its own needs, its own goals, its own schedule. For yet another thing, the people who manage projects have so many competing priorities that it's hard to know what is important to work on.

The projects themselves, meanwhile, are often so uncertain that it's hard to know what's worth doing. The project management discipline is a response to these problems. It helps identify and exploit the common features of a project's life cycle. But some of these features are so complex that they don't lend themselves to standardization. The project management discipline has to manage complexity in its own way, by making tradeoffs.

The stakes are high. The discipline's job is to coordinate the efforts of many people, often with conflicting goals, who are all trying to produce something at the same time. The projects themselves have, or expect to have, large impact. And many projects can achieve their impact only when several people cooperate, making their own tradeoffs.

The discipline has to manage complexity in its own way, by making tradeoffs. The discipline's goal is to maximize value, whatever that turns out to be. ("Maximize value" is a phrase that has come into common use recently, and is not in the original Project Management Body of Knowledge. But "maximize value" is a perfectly good phrase, and project management's goal is to maximize value, not maximize money.)

Project management is the art of organizing the activities that must be done in order to accomplish a desired result. Project management is like any other form of organization: it works best when the people involved have a common understanding of how it is organized and how they work.

Many organizations work pretty well without project management. Although organizations with formalized project management processes are often better at getting projects done, you don't need project management to get projects done. Project management is useful because it makes all the participants in a project team work together more effectively. It brings together people from different parts of the organization. It helps each person clarify his or her role. It helps each team member understand how his or her work contributes to the project and to the overall organization. It helps each team member understand how his or her work fits into the overall project plan.

Project planning using PMS Tools online

Project management is a discipline, not a set of techniques. It is a system of organization, not a list of techniques. Every project team needs a project charter. The charter sets up the project's goals, its resources, and its schedule. Without a project charter, people are left free to do whatever they want, and the project does not really exist. Every project team needs a project schedule. The schedule tells each team member when he or she has to accomplish what. Without a schedule, no team member knows when he or she is supposed to do what.

Every project team needs a project plan. The plan describes what will happen in the project, when it will happen, and who will do it. Without a plan, it is hard for team members to know what to do, and it is hard to understand what the team members are doing. Every project team needs a project management plan. The management plan describes how the project will be managed. The plan describes how people will be allocated responsibilities, which parts of the project they will manage, and which people they will work with.

Steps in using online project management software for business managers

A project manager's job is to coordinate the efforts of many different people. That job is not easy.

People do most of the work, but they aren't very good at it at first, and they often change their minds.

A project manager has to learn that other people are as much individual personalities as they are members of teams, and deal with both.

A project manager has to keep the big picture in mind, while constantly taking small steps.

The project manager has to figure out how to be both a boss and a friend.

And a project manager has to do all this while managing their own time, and remembering that other people's time is just as valuable as their own.

This is a lot to ask of one person.

Fortunately, there are simple tools that can make it easy for the project manager.

Here are the top five:

1. A calendar.
2. A to-do list.
3. A list-of-lists.
4. A project management tool.
5. Some way of keeping organized.

Why you need online project management software in your business

Project management is a challenging task, particularly if you have many projects you need to handle at the same time. When you feel overwhelmed, it is often a good idea to seek out a project management tool. Project management software can help you manage multiple projects simultaneously, and it can help you track progress more easily. You can use project management software to identify which projects are best to take on next, and which ones should be put off for a while.

Online project management software can help you manage multiple projects simultaneously, and it can help you track progress more easily. You can use project management software to identify which projects are best to take on next, and which ones should be put off for a while.

Project management software can also help by keeping track of all of the different tasks you need to complete for each project. It can keep track of who is in charge of each task, and when it needs to get done.

Modern project management tools

A few years ago, I found myself working as a project manager on a new project. This was both exciting and daunting. Exciting because, as a software engineer, I felt I was finally doing something useful, and daunting, because I had no idea how to do it. The project involved using modern software tools to manage the software project, and it had all the classic problems. The development team was enthusiastic but disorganized; the project managers had a vague idea of how to organize the team but no clear idea of how to organize the software; the managers had a vague idea of how to organize the software but no clear idea of how to organize the business.

I learned a few things. First, that a software project, like anything, requires planning. Second, that modern tools can help a lot, if you learn how to use them. But I also learned that modern project management is like modern software engineering: nobody understands how to do it. People keep coming up with new approaches, and some of them are brilliant. But none of them are clearly better than anything else. Modern project management is like modern software engineering: nobody understands how to do it.

People keep coming up with new approaches, and some of them are brilliant. But none of them are clearly better than anything else. There's lots of evidence that modern project management doesn't work. But anyone who actually tries to implement a new plan sees that it doesn't work. The evidence of failure keeps piling up. Modern project management requires PMS tools to beat competition because everybody keeps reinventing the wheel.

Designing online project management tools for business

Project management is a lot like programming. Trying to solve a problem is the first step. Then you have to figure out which solution will work. And once you have a solution, you have to convince other people to use it. And it's tempting, once you have a solution, to think you've solved the problem.

The things that make up software are infrastructure: computers, files, databases, programming languages, and so on. The software itself is just a collection of tools you may use to solve these problems.  The things that make up project management are infrastructure too. You have templates, methodologies, tools, and standards. But these too are just tools you may use to solve these problems.

What's important is what problems you have, not the tools you use to solve them, or what methods you use to describe what you're doing. It's tempting, once you have a solution, to think you've solved the problem. So be careful. If you identify your problem incorrectly, you may build the wrong solution.

Project management in Technology

A lot of software companies talk about being "customer-focused" but in my experience, they are rarely customer-focused. They talk about being "user-centered" but in my experience, they are not user-centered. They talk about being "agile" but in my experience, they are not agile. They talk about being "stakeholder" but in my experience, they are not stakeholders. The cause, I think, is that software companies seem to think that project management is something that happens on a team. Projects happen because teams do projects. Most teams do projects poorly.

A software project is like a bridge. The designer creates the blueprint, and you, the contractor, build the bridge in accordance with the blueprint. So, if you build a bridge according to the blueprints, you build a bridge that can be built according to the blueprints. Software companies think that using PMS tools is critical for project success. But project management is project management, not project building. Most software projects don't build bridges, they build things that are not bridges. A bridge is a specific thing with a very specific function. Most software projects aren't specific things with specific functions. Usually, their function is something more general, like making information easier to move around.

Software projects don't create things; they copy things. They take existing things and make them work more efficiently. And when they do this, they almost always try to improve existing things. This makes sense. If you build a bridge, the bridge has to fit the existing terrain, and the existing terrain has to fit the existing bridges. But if you improve an existing thing, you improve the existing thing; you don't have to fit the existing thing.

Role of Project Managers in modern businesses

Designing a project plan is not just a matter of following a recipe. The project plan is only as good as the people in the team. Suppose you're in charge of moving your office to a new location, and you hire a team to do it. Everyone loves the idea, and the first day everything seems perfect. But then the hammer hits the nail, and someone rings the dinner bell, and before you know it, you're eight weeks behind schedule and everyone is furious.

It doesn't have to be this way. Suppose you gave everyone a checklist of things to do, and every day someone checked off an item on the list. But suppose the person checking the items off was kind of a jerk. With this kind of team, nothing would get done. Modern project managers need PMS tool to manage projects.

Understanding project management

Project management is a field of work that deals with the management of resources such as time, money, people, materials and equipment in order to meet specific objectives.

The project manager is the person in charge of all the activities involved with a project. To do this, the project manager must be able to plan and organize the work, assign tasks to team members, make budgets, monitor progress and control resources.

The project manager has the power to make decisions on the allocation of resources, and to keep employees informed of such decisions.

Project management is a profession and this must be done according to a strict code of ethics.

Making Money in project management

Project management is one of the most helpful disciplines for making money. If you can organize a group of people to do a task, and charge them to do it, you make a lot of money. Skilled project managers can make a lot of money.

But the only people who know how to do project management well are project managers. Not everyone can be one. Being one requires a lot of specialized knowledge. Fortunately, however, project managers need a lot of specialized knowledge. And it turns out that you don't need to be one yourself. You don't need to be the one who does the job; all you need to do is figure out what the job of the person who will be doing the job should be. Online project management software helps you to achieve more everyday with less work.

Use PMS tools for effective project management

So managing projects is a way to make wealth, for a circle of people. But it isn't the only way. There are other ways to make money by managing other people. Some of these ways involve making projects, some don't. The easiest is to buy a job from someone who has it. Then you don't have to do the work yourself. You can hire someone to do it. The trouble, of course, is that someone else has to do the job.

Another way is to hire someone to do the work for you. Here you hire one person to do the work of several people. Now your job is to find out how many people the work can be done by. Your job is then to hire someone to do the work. The biggest enterprise in management is the enterprise of managing other people. And managing other people is the thing no one does well.

The people who do the best job of managing other people are economists. Because economists are specialists. They have a special way of looking at things. They have a special way of looking at people, and at groups of people, and at businesses, and at projects. Economists have special ways of measuring things: things like productivity, or quality, or cost, or profit.

Project managers in modern projects

Summary

A project manager is, by definition, someone who manages projects. But most project managers don't manage projects, they plan them. People who plan projects often think in terms of managing budgets. They look at a project and ask how much it costs and how long it will last. They also ask how long it will take to make the project. Then they can subtract those answers to find out how much money the project will cost and how much work it will require. The problem is that those calculations don't tell you how long the project will take. They assume that everything will go according to plan that the project will start and end on schedule. Project managers use PMS tools to simplify their work

But for complex projects, things rarely go according to plan. People get sick, unexpected problems develop, and the weather doesn't always cooperate. Even when everything goes right, it can take longer than expected Project managers tend to ignore this uncertainty. They plan as if this were an ordinary business project. Instead of asking how long the various tasks will take, they predict how long they will take if everything goes according to plan.

This kind of thinking is one reason why projects take so long, and why companies lose so much money on them. If a project manager is managing the project, then, he not only has to think about money. He has to manage people as well. He has to motivate the people working on the project, educate them, and give them feedback. He has to stay in touch with the clients, respond to their requests, and explain to them why things aren't going as fast as they had hoped. He has to keep all the moving parts moving, and make sure no one gets left out. To do all that, he needs a lot of experience and the right online project management software.

Who is a project manager?

A project manager is a person who gets paid a lot to keep other people from paying a lot. Software managers are the people other project managers go to when they aren't sure what software to use. There are all kinds of software managers: software consultants, product managers, product managers for developers, project sponsors, and so on.

The job of the project manager is to make sure that other people spend as much money as they want, while staying within budget. Software managers are the people who make sure other people spend as much money as they want, while staying within budget.

What Does a project manager do?

Project management is the art of getting stuff done. The distinction between project management and business analysis is that business analysis is about solving business problems, and project management is about getting things done. The distinction can be important: I have a friend who was a consultant, and he says business analysis is "doing the due diligence," and project management is "taking the actions that bring the due diligence to fruition." The distinction between management and leadership is more subtle. As James Collins writes in Good to Great, "Leadership is about inspiring and motivating people. Management is about getting things done."

Do you wish to become a project manager?

Project management is a noble profession. But why is it noble? Why does it deserve special respect and special treatment? One reason is that it is not an academic subject. It deals with the real world, and the real world is messy: things are complicated, people are unpredictable, and things don't always work. If we want to do a good job of project management, we have to be able to deal with that. Another reason is that project management is demanding. The job is about getting things done, and getting things done requires hard choices. Sometimes you have to choose between doing it right and getting it done. Sometimes you have to do it twice, first a little and then a lot.

A third reason is that project management involves doing and not doing. You have to set priorities, make trade-offs, and decide what to spend your time on. You have to say no, even when you know you should say yes. And you have to persuade other people to do the things that need to be done, even when they don't really want to.

And these are just the things you have to do in project management. You also have to deal with people. You have to deal with the people who work for you; you have to deal with the people who work for you's boss; and you have to deal with the people who work for you's boss's boss. You have to know their interests and priorities, and you have to know their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Sometimes you have to make them do things they don't want to do, and other times you have to persuade them to do things they do want to do. The more you have to do with people, the more project management is like being a project manager.

Summary

The most important lesson from projects is that success requires teamwork. Successful projects require everyone on the team to pull together, and everyone on the team to contribute. A project is a named set of activities that need to follow specific steps to be completed within a specific amount of time. For example, a project might be to develop a new design for a widget, or to launch a product, or to meet a payroll. By breaking these tasks down into smaller tasks, and breaking them down further into smaller tasks, you can assign specific tasks to people. These individuals then have to complete those tasks and pass the results up the line for approval, and so on.

A project manager is the person who is in charge. The project manager is responsible for the overall plan, for making sure everyone is following it, and for keeping everyone informed about progress. Sometimes people call this person a "project manager." But more often, the project manager is the person who manages people.

A project plan is created by identifying the activities needed to complete the project, and identifying who is responsible for each one. The plan should be written in a step-by-step fashion, with key dates, milestones, and deliverables. After the project plan is created, and before work begins, the project manager needs to evaluate the project.

Ask the right questions in project management

This is usually done using a simple project evaluation checklist, which lists questions such as the following:

* What are the goals?

* What problem does the project solve?

* Who will be affected by the project?

* What resources will the project use?

* How will the project be implemented?

* How will the project be tracked?

* What are the costs?

* How will the project be assessed?

* How much work has been done so far?

* When will the project manager have a detailed progress report?

* When will the project be finished?

* Who will evaluate the project?

What does a project manager need?

To understand the scope and get all the above questions right, project managers use PMS tools for business.  Project managers use software to manage projects. Software is all the clever stuff we do to make computers do things. Most software does one thing well. Software for project management doesn't do project management; it manages schedules and budgets.

Once upon a time, software was very much like hardware. You bought a computer and it came with an operating system. You bought more software. But software has advantages over hardware. Software can be copied. You can carry software with you. Software is a much more flexible tool. Yet because software does so many useful things, it is hard to keep track of all the variations in software that people use.

Fortunately, software companies don't usually want you to use their software. They use software only because it is convenient for them. The software companies have programmers who write software, and they sell that software to the people who can use it.

The people who use the software have managers, who handle their use of the software. Software companies are not in the business of managing projects. The managers of software companies sell the software; they don't manage projects. Managers of software companies sell licenses. The managers of software companies make money only if they convince the users to buy more licenses.

Project management is not product management

Project management is a set of processes, methods, and techniques used to plan, organize, manage, and control resources and time to achieve specific objectives within defined constraints, often in the context of a workplace. Modern Project management is distinct from traditional project management in that the former focuses on project management as a discipline, the latter on project management as a technique or strategy. Project management is focused on the management of a single project or set of related projects.

Project management differs from product development in that the former is the management of a specific deliverable, whereas the latter is the management of a specific product. Project management differs from program management in that the former focuses on the initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and control of specific projects, whereas the latter focuses on the initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and control of an entire program.

Project management Scenarios

The first major project I worked on was for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Our original idea was to build a computer version of the company's telephone directories, so that customers could look up their own names. It was always a very gradual process. First, we recruited a few dozen people, each assigned to research one aspect of the problem, then another, and another: hardware, operating systems, software, networking, and so on. Over time, we figured out what computers could do, and what the weaknesses were in what we had. Finally, we built the first working prototype, but it was too late. The technology was already obsolete.

Since then, it has always seemed like the joke was on project management. Projects were always huge, always far over budget, and often completely unworkable. How could that be? How could one group of people think they could build a software system, another group figure out how to make hardware, and a third group figure out how to transmit the data? How could these different groups ever agree? And yet, somehow, they always did.

There was a reason. The project manager wasn't in charge. The project wasn't organized as a series of little subsystems, each with its own set of contractors and bosses. Instead, we organized the project as one big system, with each component built using whatever technology was at hand. Thus, for example, the networking group designed its own operating system, and the software group created its own programming language. This idea was radical. It had never occurred to anyone before. But it worked. That project, like every successful one, had something in common: it used project management the way it should have been used, not as a collection of separate processes, but as a system.

What do modern project managers do?

Project management is the art and science of managing projects. A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. Projects are generally undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives that are often set by top management. A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. Project management is the art and science of managing complex projects. A complex project has many interdependent components and uncertain requirements.

Project managers organize, plan, direct, control and motivate people engaged in producing something. Project management is the practice of coordinating people, activities and resources to achieve specific goals and objectives.  Project management process. Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.

Project management can be broadly defined as the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements. Project management uses three basic disciplines: A project management methodology (a body of theory that describes and prescribes how projects are performed). A project management methodology (a body of theory that describes and prescribes how projects are performed). Project management standards and tools (a body of standards, guidelines, and recommended practices). PMS tools (systems and software).