Management is a process concerned with achievement of goals or objectives. Project Management involves the coordination of group activity wherein the manager plans, organizes staff, directs, and controls to achieve an objective with constraints on time, cost and performance of the end product.
It is appropriate at this point to elaborate on the term project. A project's a set of tasks or activities related to the achievement of some planned objective, normally where the objective is unique or non-repetitive in nature. Thus, a project is usually distinguished from repetitive or continuous production process by the characteristic of uniqueness or the one shot' nature of the objective. Projects may involve repetitiousness where project planning techniques are useful for detailed analysis and optimization of the operating plan. Planning is the process of preparing for the commitment of resources in the most effective fashion. Controlling is the process of making events conform to schedules by coordinating the action of all functions of the organisation according to tbe plan established for attaining the objective. It can also be said that project management is a blend of art and science : the art of getting.things done through and with people in finally organised groups; and the science of handling large volume of data to plan and control so that project duration and cost are balanced and excessive and disruptive demands on scare resources are avoided.
In all of these projects, management is concerned with developing a optimum and workable plan of the activities that make up the project including a specification of their interrelationships. Also management is interested in scheduling these activities in an acceptable time scale, considering the manpower and other resources required to carry out the program as it progresses in time. Management is also concerned with monitoring the expenditure of time and money in carrying out the scheduled program, as well as the resulting output, quality or performance, for cases where achievement of the project objective(s) can be measured on a co?tinuous or ordinal scale(s). The ultimate objective of planning is timely and economical implementation of project. A well managed project should have a proper integration in both planning and implementation efforts, enlivenment on the part of people engaged on implementation and involvement by the top management in the monitoring of projects and trouble-shooting. Engineering contract, and start-up services which translate a project concept into a goods producing or service generating facility should be very well planned, organised, implemented and controlled for the success of the project. The owner of the project must closely monitor all the functions and ensure that its various activities are on schedule and they are enabling other project
activities like procurement, contracting, construction and commissioning to proceed as per schedule, without hold-up. A well designed performance reporting system and a good data management system are vital requirement for an efficient Project Management Function.
Objectives
After studying this unit, you should be able to
- understand the various aspects of project management,
- discuss various techniques of project planning implementation,
- enumerate various project procurement and materials management functions,
- describe various controlling tools and techniques to combat project overruns,
- develop a computer system for preparing computerised network based project planning
- identify the critical path of a project, and
- define risk kagement as a control function.
No comments:
Post a Comment