Why Is Project Management Is Considered As An Important Management Discipline

Imagine yourself going north for about 100 kilometres of distance in a dark night!

You know the direction and the distance to be traveled (i.e. the final outcome of the project). What you do not know is the path, preparation, terrain, obstacles, conditions and more.

Would it not help our journey if we study more, plan for the travel and prepare for our journey before we begin the journey? And keep in mind, we may also have to make course corrections during our entire journey! This could be called as project management! In other words, a systematic approach to meet the project outcome.

Without a plan and preparation, we may not reach the desired destination or may not reach in time or reach with injuries or may never reach at all!

In project management terms, our project may not complete in time and under budget! Alternatively you could say, our project may not meet the defined objectives!

Real World Implementation Notes:

The outcome of any project is generally defined at a high level.

Three key challenges before the project begin;

1. It takes a lot of time to define every detail of the outcome of the project,
2. It is difficult to define the details and
3. The organization may not have the subject matter expertise.

So, most of the project would begin without much details about the outcome! As the project progresses, the mystery unfolds.

Without a systematic approach, these projects would not complete as desired.

Hence, project management has gained importance in recent years as separate management discipline.

The high level project processes as below:

• Understand the objective (define)
• Plan (detail) how to meet objective
• Executing the plan (doing it)
• Making course corrections (controlling)

Meeting the project objective (handover and close)