An increasing number of technical professionals are being called upon to be project managers, subproject leaders, or technical team leaders for endeavors within their companies. Even if they do not intend to make Project Manager their permanent title, they need to understand what project management is in their situation, what they need to do to perform well in this role, how to manage their own work, and how to foster the work of others.
The management of our organizations likewise needs to understand more about good project management. Companies often decide to improve their project management when they recognize that they are not meeting their objectives. They don't ship their products on time or achieve desired cost targets. Their shipped products are of poor quality, with defects and feature shortcomings, and they are miss market windows, lagging behind their competition. Overall, they fail to achieve an acceptable return on their engineering and product development investment. Improved project management seems to be at least one answer.
But before we launch our project management initiative to save the company, we need to ask: what exactly is project management? To many people, it is simply the realm of plans, schedules, budgets, and status reports. Certainly many engineers, who have watched the management function from afar, can all too easily believe that project management is simply a "mechanical" function focused mainly on paperwork and politics. It is critical that this impression of project management be debunked. When an individual wants to become an outstanding project manager, and when a company realizes that it must improve its ability to successfully manage its work, they both must quickly realize that many factors other than scheduling techniques will come into play.
A company's project management capability is in the hands of its people: their personal leadership, their ability to work on a team, the skills they each possess, the techniques they choose to perform their work, and the processes they use together to integrate their efforts. A corporation's level of ongoing performance will also be a function of how well it learns from the successes and failures of its past efforts and works to develop its people over time.
This issue is dedicated to enlarging our view of what good project management is all about-the important organizational considerations, critical project manager skills, and nuts and bolts tools and techniques that project managers and team members should know. Our selection of articles address questions such as:
Questions such as these also serve to broaden our understanding of the stakeholders of and contributors to good project management. How well we as a company choose to manage our endeavors will affect the quality of our daily work lives. The management techniques we choose will touch our personal technical work and how well we integrate aspects such as quality management with our work will - determine the ultimate success of our projects. Whatever your role, we invite you to broaden your perspective of good project management, and find your personal opportunity to grow and contribute.