Project Management Essay

ASSIGNMENT NUMBER-1

Answer 1- Project management has come a long way and seen rapid development. It can be basically described as a means by which different organizations try to achieve their goals in some systematic manner.  It helps organizations to have powerful tools which further helps them to improve its planning, implementation and execution. The concept of Project management came from the government, military to be precise. Their complex projects gave rise to a new scheme of things which would have been a tedious task with the traditional ways. Project Management has emerged because of the ever increasing demand from the society. The 3 major forces that have contributed to the need of project management are as follows.

• Exponential expansion of the human knowledge
• The growing demand for a broad range of complex, sophisticated, customized goods and services
• The evolution of worldwide competitive markets for the production and consumption of goods and services.

All these forces when combined together form an integral part of project management. They give rise to some complex ideas which leads to the need for more sophisticated systems which controls outcomes and processes.

For the first factor, I consider knowledge as the fundamental thing for project management. This forms the base to the various solutions to the questions associated with the various stages of project management.

The second factor- The more complex and customized products one builds the more he has to be satisfying meeting the continuous demands and this would be based on his ability to think and how he deals with it.

The third factor - Worldwide markets plays an important role in order for the project to be a success. They include factors as cultural and environmental differences in the managerial decisions we make. No matter how smart a person is, he cannot be perfect in managing all these all by himself. So, it is important to build a team and work with them which further requires high level of co-ordination and co-operation.

The other factor which can be included here is the level of competition.

Answer 3- Limitations of Project Management

With a large project the conflicts also arises eventually. We can say that the increasing number of projects is directly proportional to the conflicts that takes place. These conflicts are also characterized further with some conflicts being the helpful ones. The project manager should recognize and understand this and act appropriately. A project manager has to be an excellent coordinator.

The stake holders which includes, 1) Client 2) Parent Organizations 3) Project team and 4) Public. They all contribute to the success and failure of the project. These contradictions on the objectives which has to be achieved by the respective parties differ, which puts a lot of pressure on the members working on that project. But the real limitations are the diversity while working on a project. Like there are many parts and subdivisions in a project ( R&D, Marketing, construction etc.) they do have some similar things to some extent when managing but each department has some unique qualities too which should be understood. So, this tends to bring some change in the expected schedule, which leads to conflicts and disagreements over that project. During the initial stages, the project managers do predict about the fate of the project and to some extent it works as well, but this is applicable for small projects. But as the size of the projects increases, these predictions tend to lose their path. It’s very tough to predict the outcome initially, which I consider a limitation of project management. As, there is no full proof method where we can predict the outcome right every time.