Project Management Best Practices

I came a across an interesting article on the Projects@work website, Enabling Career Advancement by Mary Ann Bopp, Diana Bing and Sheila Forte-Trammell, which is an excerpt from their book, Agile Career Development: Lessons and Approaches from IBM.

Their basic premise is that: “Project-driven organizations can benefit in many ways from creating a career framework that gives employees the opportunity to grow — and share — their knowledge and skills by moving across job roles or business units. In the process, they align company values and culture, optimize resources and increase client satisfaction.”

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With the current financial downturn, organizations are looking for ways to cut costs. In their haste, these organizations may make some mistakes concerning the value of project management.

First of all, many decision-makers mistakenly believe that project management is a luxury, an overhead expense that, in a pinch, can be done without. After all, it’s the team members who do the actual work, right? The PM is just an administrator, coordinator or status report writer.

Not True!!

Proven project management processes and practices can make the difference between the success or failure of an enterprise’s business strategy. Project management is more than just coordinating the work of others and reporting on their progress. Project management has protocols, methodologies and proven professional practices based on experience, consensus and scholarly research. There’s a big difference between being a general manager and being a project manager. Project management is a well-defined specialty within the management domain.

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