Chapter 1. An Overview of Project Management

What’s all the fuss about, anyway? Since the first edition of this book was published in 1997, the Project Management Institute (PMI^®) has grown from a few thousand to nearly 250,000 in 2006. For those of you who don’t know, PMI is the professional organization for people who manage projects. You can get more information from their web site, www.pmi.org. In addition to providing a variety of member services, a major objective of PMI is to advance project management as a profession. To do so, they have established a certification process whereby qualifying individuals receive the Project Management Professional (PMP^®) designation. To do so, such individuals must have work experience (approximately 5000 hours) and pass an online exam which is based on the Project Management Body of Knowledge or PMBOK^®.

A professional association? Just for project management? Isn’t project management just a variant on general management?

Yes and no. There are a lot of similarities, but there are enough differences to treat project management as a discipline separate from general management. For one thing, projects are more schedule-intensive than most of the activities that general managers handle. And the people in a project team often don’t report directly to the project manager, whereas they do report to most general managers.

So just what is project management, and for that matter, what is a project? PMI defines a project as “. . . a temporary endeavor undertaken to produce a unique product, service, or result” (PMBOK 2004, p. 5). This means that a project is done only one time. If it is repetitive, it’s not a project. A project should have definite starting and ending points (time), a budget (cost), a clearly defined scope—or magnitude—of work to be done, and specific performance requirements that must be met. I say “should” because seldom does a project conform to the desired definition. These constraints on a project, by the way, will be referred to throughout this book as the PCTS targets.

PMI defines a project as “. . . a temporary endeavor undertaken to produce a unique product, service, or result.”

Dr. J. M. Juran, the quality guru, also defines a project as a problem scheduled for solution. I like this definition because it reminds me that every project is conducted to solve some kind of problem for a company. However, I must caution that the word problem typically has a negative meaning, and projects deal with both positive and negative kinds of problems. For example, developing a new product is a problem, but a positive one, while an environmental cleanup project deals with a negative kind of problem.

A project is a problem scheduled for solution.

—J. M. Juran