Simply put, a project is a unique and time limited endeavor with a defined beginning and end. Projects have specific goals and objectives.

What defines project management?

Project management is the discipline (or art or science, depending who you talk to about it) of planning, organizing and managing resources with the goal of meeting specific objectives related to the project. These objectives are often referred to as constraints. Constraints generally involve a magic triangle with three points – scope, time and budget. A scope generally defines the common understanding among all project members and stakeholders and is a written document variously referred to as a statement of work, scope statement, project charter or project plan. The terminology used is affected by the size of the project. Most readers will be familiar with the concepts of time and budgets. The magic triangle of constraints can be manipulated to some extent during a project’s lifecycle and ultimately affect the quality of the project and its overall success or failure. Getting the goals, objectives, budget and schedule accurately forecast at the beginning of the project is the major factor in whether a project will succeed or fail.

Groups of projects are referred to as programs, and are directed by program managers, who often oversee groups of project managers as their primary job responsibility.

Projects generally have phases that can include: defining the project, planning the project, securing approval for the project, implementing the project and evaluating the project. The first three phases of a project do not always occur in the order in which they have been listed here.

Priorities and politics

It is a tendency of human endeavors that priorities vary among groups of people. Engineers will have a different set of values than financiers, for instance. One of the major roles, if not the most important role of a project manager is to juggle priorities among groups involved in any project. Additionally, a project manager must clearly communicate potential pitfalls and present a range of solutions and recommendations that will ensure the project stays within constraints and be judged successful during the evaluation phase. This aspect of project management is often referred to as risk management. Risk management should start early in a project’s lifecycle. This helps avoid major stumbling blocks to success as they are identified, prioritized and discussed early. Risks are reviewed often and their priority and mitigation adjusted based on changing conditions related to the project.

Stakeholders and deliverables

The project manager is often responsible to many stakeholders. Stakeholders are entities who have assumed a risk by approving the project and who have granted trust that the project manager will mitigate that risk and deliver a successful result based on deliverables. Deliverables are generally tangible and always measurable. Deliverables often stack or group. In information technology, a deliverable might be a report, a dashboard filled with a series of graphically displayed key performance indicators or an entire software product based on a combination of inputs, outputs and reporting tools. Deliverables for an IT hardware project might include a specific number of servers with a specific amount of redundancy and failover to be installed inside a data center. Stakeholders will hold a project manager responsible for defining deliverables and then ensuring each is met without breaking the magic triangle of constraints.

Whether or not a project is deemed successful is often based on a project manager’s ability to convey progress throughout the project’s life while simultaneously managing risk effectively.

For a more in depth project management primer, we suggest the Bright Hub four-part series Project Management Basics, by Deanna Reynolds.

What makes Evernote so valuable is that it can become your crib sheet for life. If you are not familiar with the term crib sheet don’t be upset. Back in prehistoric times before the iPhone students used to try and make cryptic notes on small scraps of paper that they would hide in a sock or somewhere on their person to “assist” them in passing a scholastic exam. Now those all important reminders to oneself don’t have to be hidden in a sock – they can follow you from your desktop to your laptop to your iPhone, iPad or Android device. If you’re anywhere in the world where cellular service exists you can also use the backup brain on a little color screen to help you remember that name, face or all important Swiss bank account code.

Things will only get better. By 2019 there it is likely many people will have built-in Evernote style memory enhancement devices subdermally implanted in an arm or some other strategic location. Perhaps many will have a HUD that feeds them personal information across the horizon, much like today’s pilots experience. The world is awash in more and more information. It follows that all of us will need better and better tools to capture, store, sort, filter and retrieve that information. Go check out Evernote – the free version is probably adequate for most of you information hoarders. If you are a superuser you might want the paid version – at $45 per year most people should get a good return on investment.

Stop multitasking.

Remove all expectations that your organization’s employees should be doing two, three or even five things at once. Such an approach to business only ensures that the quality of the tasks a person is juggling goes down corresponding to the number and complexity of the tasks juggled. If you expect your employees to work on five tasks concurrently, then lower your output quality expectations by 500%. Do not take my word for it; listen to the former chief information officer at Google.

As smart as you think you are, your brain can only handle so much, so stop over-extending it by trying to check Twitter, read the web and use email all at once.

At least, that is what Google’s ex-CIO, Douglas Merrill told a reporter.

When we are trying to do a bunch of things at the same time, we are just being inefficient, he says.

“Your short term memory is limited to holding five to nine elements. If you do more than that at once, you will drop things. The process of moving things from the short term memory to the long term memory is error prone,” says Douglas. Douglas has a Ph.D in cognitive science from Princeton, was CIO at Google, and a COO at EMI. Now, he’s working on a stealth startup in the financial services space. He also just released a new book called, “Getting Organized In The Google Era,” in which he tries to help people stay focused.

One of Douglas’ five key points for getting things is never multitask. Got it? Don’t encourage others to multitask. Don’t support multitasking. Don’t text and drive. Don’t do a phone conference while you are on the toilet. Do not shred confidential papers while you are typing a love letter to your significant other. Focus. The other four tips offered by Douglas Merrill are good but the key tip is our an information society’s biggest failing. The expectation that we multi-task from the moment we wake until the moment our eyes close in sleep is ridiculous. It leads to early burnout and high blood pressure. It leads to lower quality decision making. Multi-tasking is evil.

Fight the urge and demand that those under your sphere of influence do so as well.  You and the organizations you represent will all benefit from your intensity and singular concentration. Substance addicts should take one day at a time. Information addicts need to take one task at a time.

Why do projects, particularly IT projects fail? Some of the reasons include:

• Failure to define – if you haven’t clearly understood what you are trying to achieve with the project you have failed before you are out of the gate.
• Scope creep – changing the goals of the project after the project is underway. Some flexibility is good. Too much spells disaster.
• Micromanagement – project managers who don’t know how to delegate doom projects all the time. A key element of success in project management is divvying up the work appropriately. This is one of the primary responsibilities of the project manager.
• Poorly defined roles – do you know who the project stakeholder is? Does everyone on your project team understand their own role and the role of everyone they work with?
• Flooding the project with resources -  without a clearly defined project management plan this is the equivalent of firing a weapon on fully automatic without aiming. You might hit your target but you might hit a lot of other things too. The U.S. military removed the fully automatic switch from its basic infantry rifle for a reason.
• Overstaffing – project managers need a clear understanding of the human resources they’ll require prior to the project’s kickoff. Throwing in additional human resources as a project is failing usually compounds the problem rather than alleviating it. Run lean and efficient.

CIO.com recommends the following eight best practices to avoid project failures:

1. Define – make sure roles and responsibilities, project standards and project goals are all crystal clear.
2. Evaluate – organizations need a vetting process so that only the best ideas actually morph into projects.
3. Resources – make sure you have the right people and the right budget.
4. Goals and objectives – every member of the project needs a basic understanding of what you are trying to achieve.
5. Control – the project manager must maintain firm control of scope and budget.
6. Monitor – are the milestones being met?
7. Measure -what are the metrics for success?
8. Improve – learn what you could have done better and apply it to the next project.

Source: Project Management: 8 Steps to On-Time, On-Budget Delivery