What is Project Management?

by Steve Blake, Meridian Project Management, CEO and Webmaster

Hire a professional project manager in Boise, Meridian and Nampa.

Project management is a discipline of planning, organizing, securing and managing resources to achieve specific goals to the satisfaction of project stakeholders.

A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and defined end. In other words, successful projects have a planned start date, and a planned end date. Projects have constraints such as money, time, brain-power, skill-sets and other resources. Some constraints are defined by stakeholders, and other constraints identified by project team members.

Projects are undertaken to meet specific goals and objectives of the stakeholder, where the stakeholder is usually someone in power and who has a stake (cost, investment, etc) in the success of the project and/or business. Projects are often if not always intended to be successful and bring about beneficial change or added value. Since projects have a start and end date, they are considered temporary, which stands in stark contrast to what businesses do on a day-to-day, month-to-month operational basis. Businesses often are doing the same things over and over in repetitive and permanent or semi-permanent functional activities that produce products or services. 

In practice, the management of projects and the management of businesses are different managerial disciplines, and as such each discipline requires the development of distinct technical skills and management strategies.

The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honoring the preconceived constraints such as scope, time, and budget. The secondary challenge - and more ambitious - is to optimize the integration of resources to meet and satisfy pre-defined objectives of stakeholders.

The project manager is the person hired by the stakeholder to accomplish the project on-time, within budget and achieve other specific goals.