Microsoft Project Task Status Indicator M' title='Microsoft Project Task Status Indicator M' />Project management Wikipedia. Project management is the discipline of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time. A project is a temporary endeavor designed to produce a unique product, service or result with a defined beginning and end usually time constrained, and often constrained by funding or staffing undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value. The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast with business as usual or operations,3 which are repetitive, permanent, or semi permanent functional activities to produce products or services. In practice, the management of such distinct production approaches requires the development of distinct technical skills and management strategies. The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. Microsoft Project 2010 Microsoft Project 2010 The official blog of the Microsoft Project product team. Learn how to manage your projects effectively. One way to evaluate whether your project schedule is good is to measure it against this list of quality checks from the Defense Contract Management Agency. CelerisSystems DEFINING COMPLETE IN MICROSOFT PROJECT PREPARED BY James E Aksel, PMP, PMISP, MVP For Additional Information about Earned Value Management Systems. The primary constraints are scope, time, quality and budget. The secondary and more ambitious challenge is to optimize the allocation of necessary inputs and apply them to meet pre defined objectives. The object of project management is to produce a complete project which complies with the clients objectives. In many cases the object of project management is also to shape or reform the clients brief in order to feasibly be able to address the clients objectives. Once the clients objectives are clearly established they should impact on all decisions made by other people involved in the project project managers, designers, contractors, sub contractors, etc. If the project management objectives are ill defined or too tightly prescribed it will have a detrimental effect on decision making. Microsoft Project Task Status Indicator M' title='Microsoft Project Task Status Indicator M' />HistoryeditUntil 1. Vitruvius first century BC, Christopher Wren 1. Thomas Telford 1. Isambard Kingdom Brunel 1. In the 1. 95. 0s organizations started to systematically apply project management tools and techniques to complex engineering projects. Henry Gantt 1. As a discipline, project management developed from several fields of application including civil construction, engineering, and heavy defense activity. Two forefathers of project management are Henry Gantt, called the father of planning and control techniques,1. Gantt chart as a project management tool alternatively Harmonogram first proposed by Karol Adamiecki1. Henri Fayol for his creation of the five management functions that form the foundation of the body of knowledge associated with project and program management. Both Gantt and Fayol were students of Frederick Winslow Taylors theories of scientific management. His work is the forerunner to modern project management tools including work breakdown structure WBS and resource allocation. The 1. 95. 0s marked the beginning of the modern project management era where core engineering fields come together to work as one. Project management became recognized as a distinct discipline arising from the management discipline with engineering model. In the United States, prior to the 1. Gantt charts and informal techniques and tools. At that time, two mathematical project scheduling models were developed. The critical path method CPM was developed as a joint venture between Du. Pont Corporation and Remington Rand Corporation for managing plant maintenance projects. The program evaluation and review technique PERT, was developed by the U. S. Navy Special Projects Office in conjunction with the Lockheed Corporation and Booz Allen Hamilton as part of the Polaris missile submarine program. PERT and CPM are very similar in their approach but still present some differences. CPM is used for projects that assume deterministic activity times the times at which each activity will be carried out are known. PERT, on the other hand, allows for stochastic activity times the times at which each activity will be carried out are uncertain or varied. Because of this core difference, CPM and PERT are used in different contexts. These mathematical techniques quickly spread into many private enterprises. At the same time, as project scheduling models were being developed, technology for project cost estimating, cost management and engineering economics was evolving, with pioneering work by Hans Lang and others. In 1. 95. 6, the American Association of Cost Engineers now AACE International the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering was formed by early practitioners of project management and the associated specialties of planning and scheduling, cost estimating, and costschedule control project control. AACE continued its pioneering work and in 2. In 1. 96. 9, the Project Management Institute PMI was formed in the USA. PMI publishes A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge PMBOK Guide, which describes project management practices that are common to most projects, most of the time. PMI also offers a range of certifications. The 4 Ps of project managementeditRecent studies point to the four Ps of project management together, these 4 Ps suffice to describe the culture that exists within project teams 1 P for Plan this refers to all activities that involve planning and forecasting. At this stage, the project andor elements of the projects have not materialized yet 2 P for Processes as well documented in the PMBOK Project Management Book of Knowledge, projects consist largely of a series of predetermined and well structured processes 3 P for People People are an essential component of the projects dynamics and a number of studies show that people are at the heart of some projects endemic problems. In particular, the so called dreadful combination refers to a mixture of poor planning and inadequate people finally, 4, P for Power which describes all lines of authority, decision makers, organograms, policies for implementation and the likes. ApproacheseditThere are a number of approaches to organizing and completing project activities, including phased, lean, iterative, and incremental. There are also several extensions to project planning, for example based on outcomes product based or activities process based. Regardless of the methodology employed, careful consideration must be given to the overall project objectives, timeline, and cost, as well as the roles and responsibilities of all participants and stakeholders. Phased approacheditThe phased or staged approach breaks down and manages the work through a series of distinct steps to be completed, and is often referred to as traditional1. Although it can vary, it typically consists of five process areas, four phases plus control. Microsoft Service Provider Reference Architecture Diagram. Typical development phases of an engineering projectinitiationplanning and designconstructionmonitoring and controllingcompletion or closing. Many industries use variations of these project stages and it is not uncommon for the stages to be renamed in order to better suit the organization. For example, when working on a brick and mortar design and construction, projects will typically progress through stages like pre planning, conceptual design, schematic design, design development, construction drawings or contract documents, and construction administration.