Core Principles
To understand Project Management, you must first understand the basic principle of a project. A project is not just work, but defined, constrained, and timely executed work.
A project, regardless of the methodology or governance, has a precise start and finish. Contrast to Operational work, Project work is driven with a specific deployment goal in mind, and not just "fixing" something. Yes, an Operations team can execute project work, such as a planned update or migration of sorts. But the difference is that the team would work on this effort in a pre-determined and planned manner, with a specific resource budget in place and a time constrained schedule.
Origins
Items that you need in place for a successful project are:
- Clearly defined scope of work
- A proper leader of the effort to support scope definition and scheduling
- Properly trained resources to execute the work to accepted completion
- A proper budget to support the resource costs to execute the work
- An accepted timeline in which the work is the begin, execute and end
All of this has been adhered to and refined over the millennia. The Gardens of Babylon. The churches and castles of Europe. Even the Great Wall of China has followed these principals. And the stricter the adherence, the greater the success.
Modern day Project Management principals trace their lineage to the technical solutions and PM tools we have in place today. In 1909, Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, which is described as the influential management book of the 20th Century. One of his students, Henry Gantt, went on to create his system of work planning and control known as the Gantt chart. In the 1950s, DuPont and Remington work to develop a plant maintenance management tool, and this resulted resulting in formalization of Critical Path Management (CPM). Later, the US Navy invested its time in Project Management as part of its Polaris missile project and produce its PERT chart. This network diagram identifies the interconnectivity of work and introduces the concept of production latency based on volume of effort.
In 1969, The Project Management Institute (PMI) formalizes its concepts on Project Management and begins a structured PM process for "most projects, most of the time." But it wasn't until 30 years later that PMI released the first Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), the first PM tool designed for the new increasingly Projects for Profits world we live in today. In that timeframe, Six Sigma was introduced in 1986, to improve process efficiency across large corporate enterprises.
As software begins to take on an ever-larger role in the world, a group of leading software developers created the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in 2001. Known simply as Agile, this methodology focused on simplifying software development to increase Release to Market times and reduce the overhead of management by making development teams more self-sufficient. But this clashed with the enterprise aspect of large companies, so in 2007, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was published.
Relative in this timeframe, to support software development in large corporate environments that were not letting go of control to developers, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) was being developed to identify the phases of software development. Official documentation was released in 2007, following similar development flows of Waterfall, but with post-development improvement iterations similar to Agile.
Keys to Success
Keys to success as a Project Manager comes down to an understanding and acceptance of Role and Responsibility. Your Role is to be the Team Lead, the Project Champion, and the Deliverable Owner. If you accept this Role, then you need to understand and accept the Responsibility for the management components of a Project:
- Scope Management.
- Time Management
- Resource Management
- Risk Management
- Financial Management
- Change Management
