The management of any business process requires particular processes or stages to perform. Regardless of the sphere of your activities or business, you have to follow these stages and use various project management tools. In general, any process is an endeavor with time limits to achieve the established goals. In short, any activity with a start and an end can be called a project.
A set of processes combined with one aim to obtain a particular result is project management. It embraces three main pillars – quality, time and budget. All these factors are interdependent and are integral parts of any project. So, project management is a kind of guidance or control of your resources.
Project management can be divided in process groups, which consist of various activities within one stage. The process groups of a project are initiating, planning, executing, monitoring/control, and closing. Let’s review each of these groups more detailed.
Initiating
Here goes about the beginning of a project, namely when and how to start it. As a rule, any project is initiated based on some terms of reference, business request or agreement. During this stage, you obtain an understanding of project parties and scope. The more complicated projects require more time for initiating than the simpler ones.
Planning
The most extensive and rich in activities stage of a project is planning. All the aspects of a project should be taken into account and, hence, planned. The result of this group’s activities is Project Plan. However, this document is not a finished instrument, because various conditions and changes may influence on your plan and require an update. All aspects and data of a project are contained in project plan. Once again, the size of the plan depends on the complexity of a project. The key components of project plan are scope, schedule, budget, quality, team, communication, risks, and procurement.
Executing
A sequence of any planning is execution. Here the real work begins. Actually, executing process group is the key influence on the project plan updating. All the works on a project should be performed in strict compliance with the plan. All the mentioned key components of the plan are implemented during executing. First of all, a team is build. A project manager performs a hiring process. Managing communication is executed within the entire scope of a project. During execution stage, a project manager controls the availability of all required resources, once again, according to the budget.
By the way, it should be mentioned that all processes contained in this group are iterative. Everything is in progress until the very end of a project.
Monitoring
This stage has no specific period of time, because any part of work should be controlled. Monitoring envisages the control of execution and its compliance with the schedule, budget, and resources. Actually, the changes in the project plan are initiated during monitoring stage.
Closing
The project is over and the goals are achieved. This process includes final work with project documentation in order to finish all the paper details. The result of project is handed over to a customer. And the final result, is success.