Project Management Is For Everyone

A lot of people think that project management skills are just for people who actually manage projects. That's not true.

Actually, the tools of project management were invented by manufacturing people to help them manage work in general. Thus, the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) was developed to help identify every single activity that had to be performed to produce a manufactured thing of some kind. Schedules (critical path in particular) were developed to sequence that work. And earned value was originally a standard cost system that allowed industrial engineers to track performance of workers in manufacturing. Scheduling may originally have been part of operations research, but in any event it was an attempt to reduce throughput time.

So the methods of project management are actually just a collective set of tools to enable the management of work--of any kind, including such non-mechanical things as surgery, marketing projects, weddings, and so on. For that reason, everyone can benefit from applying the tools of project management to their project work.

One of my books, Fundamentals of Project Management, published by AMACOM, may be just right for a novice, as it presents the tools in a very non-technical way. For the individual who is actually managing projects as a career, my book, Project Planning, Scheduling and Control, 5th Edition, published by McGraw-Hill is more appropriate.

Just one observation, no matter what level of project manager you are: If you have no plan, you have no control of your project work--by definition! That hardly makes sense if you want some assurance that you can make your targets.

Happy planning!