If you were asked to define the term project, what words would come to mind? Time? Resources (or lack of)? One-of-a-kind effort? Deliverables or products? Complex? No authority over other groups? Budget? A project is a unique effort to introduce or produce a new product or service conforming to certain specifications and applicable standards. This effort is completed within the project parameters including fixed time, cost, human resources, and asset limits. Projects are said to be similar to the mating of two elephants: They start at a very high level with lots of noise and activity, but it takes forever for anything to materialize! A more serious definition is that a project is a well-organized development of an end product that had a discrete beginning, a discrete end, and a discrete deliverable. Our goal is to help you become more organized as you work toward this objective.

Project management is the discipline that relates all of those words that you thought of that apply to project. This discipline cultivates the expertise to plan, monitor, track, and manage the people, the time, the budget, and the quality of the work on projects. Project management fulfills two purposes: (1) It provides the technical and business documentation to communicate the plan and, subsequently, the status that facilitates comparison of the plan against actual performance, and (2) it supports the development of the managerial skills to facilitate better management of the people and their project(s). Project management is a proactive style of management. Negotiation techniques and good communication and analytical skills are integral parts of this approach. Another key ingredient is the evaluation of performance against those objectives. Central to this management style is the application of high standards of quality to the project work.