Project management is the ensemble of activities concerned with successfully achieving a set of goals. This includes planning, scheduling and maintaining progress of the activities that comprise the project. Reduced to its simplest Project Management is the discipline of maintaining the risk of failure at as low a value as necessary over the lifetime of the project. Risk of failure arises primarily from the presence of uncertainty at all stages of a project.
An alternate point of view is that Project Management is the discipline of defining and achieving targets while optimizing the use of resources (time, money, people, space, etc).
Project management is quite often the province and responsibility of an individual Project Manager. This individual seldom participates directly in the activities that produce the end result, but rather strives to maintain the progress and productive mutual interaction of various parties in such a way that overall risk of failure is reduced.
Not all projects will visit every stage as projects can be terminated before they reach completion. Some projects probably don't have the planning and/or the monitoring. Some projects will go through steps 2, 3 and 4 multiple times.
Project management tries to gain control over four variables:
Three of these variables can be given by external or internal customers. The value(s) of the remaining variable(s) is/are then set by project management, ideally based on solid estimation techniques. The final values have to be agreed upon in a negotiation process between project management and the customer. Usually, the values in terms of time, cost, quality and scope are contracted.
There are a number of guiding techniques that have been developed over the years that can be used to formally specify exactly how the project will be managed. These include the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), and such ideas as the Personal Software Process (PSP), and the Team Software Process (TSP) and PRINCE2. These techniques attempt to standardize the practices of the development team making them easier to predict and manage as well as track.
In critical studies of project management, it has been noted that several of these fundamentally PERT-based models are not well suited for the multi-project company environment of today. Most of them are aimed at very large-scale, one-time, non-routine project, and nowadays all kinds of management is expressed in terms of projects. Using complex models for "projects" (or rather "tasks") spanning a few weeks has been proven to cause unnecessary costs and low maneuverability in several cases. Instead project management experts try to identify different "lightweight" models, such as, for example Extreme Programming for software development and Scrum techniques. The generalization of extreme programming to other kinds of projects is extreme project management.
The main thrust of Process Management is the concept of knowledge management. It is the experience of companies that use these models that the creation of a set of defined processes detailing what the company actually does has enabled them to achieve consistency across project teams and project. They have also found that, when it is defined, their ability to track and monitor performance with a view to improvement is far more successful.
