What is Project Management ?

Project management is generally viewed as a methodology primarily designed to manage (human) resources and schedules. As evidenced by the PMbok, project management is often extended to cover much more than that. However even if Project Management is extended in this fashion it still relies primarily on the data sets inherent within any typical Project Management software packages. That data is constructed around task definition, timelines, resource data and other variables or flags such as what might represent a critical path. The term ‘Critical Path’ refers to that set of tasks which is deemed (by someone) to be crucial to the overall success of the project. Anyone who has worked in a PMO and sat through some sort of status meeting can attest though, the problem with this data comes into play whenever the question “why” is asked. Why is the project running behind schedule, what is the problem that has led to the overrun?

There is no project management methodology or software that sufficiently prepares a manager to answer those questions. That manager is wholly at the mercy of someone else to explain the cause of the problem as none of that information will be accessible (by design) within the project management software. PLM recognizes that half of a picture is not 50% good, it can be 100% worthless as often times the poor data that we do have may indicate success when in fact the project is failing. Determinations of progress are extremely difficult to make in most situations using only project management software as there is no tangible method for assessing the true complexity of any given task if that task is essence only a placeholder representing a larger set of requirements data not available.

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.