Big undertakings involving many individual activities and many individual people need some form of management to organise and direct the works. Without this management, everything will just sit around and nothing will be accomplished.
What is needed is a project manager. This person’s job is to:
- Ensure clarity of purpose – why are we undertaking this project? What is the vision for the project? What is it expected to deliver?
- Identify constraints – is there a budget we are aiming for? Is there a timeframe?
- Determine what needs to be delivered and the activities required – what do we need to deliver to accomplish the purpose of the project? What activities need to be undertaken to deliver what we need to deliver?
- Determine the dependencies between activities
- Identify what resources are needed to perform the activities – resources include skills, material, equipment, and so on
- Procure the resources
- Plan the activities – generate a work plan that respects the dependencies between tasks, respect the available resources, and when executed deliver the deliverables. The result is a schedule of work.
- Determine the risks that the project face, and plan countermeasures
- Determine how much the project will cost
- Determine the cash flow requirements of the project – how much does the project need on a monthly basis?
- Execute the plan
- Monitor and control the plan
This list of activities is roughly linear, but they will be performed in an iterative fashion because the activities depend on each other. The plan determines what resources we need, but what resources are available determine the plan we can have. The target timeframe determines the schedule of work, but the schedule of work determines the timeframe as well.
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