Everyone talks about MBA institutes and young college graduates aspire to complete their management degrees in anticipation of a good high paying job. However, among the MBA graduates how many are really good at managing important and often critical projects?
How many of the MBA institutes really bother to teach the important principles of managing projects?
Project management is a key skill that affects the success of a project. There are certain techniques and guidelines that can be learnt and applied effectively to ensure that a project is successful.
PMI or Project Management Institute is a non-profit organisation based in USA that provides standards, guidelines and methodologies for project management and related disciplines. They also provide certification in project management like PMP (Project Management Professional) and CAPM (Certified Associate in Project Management). More about that later.
The project management discipline according to PMI describes a project management life cycle that consists of 5 process groups. These are
- Initiate
- Plan
- Execute
- Monitor and Control
- Close
These always occur sequentially and in the same sequence as described above.
A project is defined as a temporary endeavour that has a beginning and an end. An operation, on the other hand, goes on continuously and could be the end result of a successful project that results in an ongoing operation.
It is a well established fact that one of the most important process groups is the Planning process group because that decides pretty much how successful a project is.
Among the knowledge areas, communication management is the most important. Project managers spend about 90% of their time in communication.