Project Management: How to Plan and Manage Successful Projects (Repost)

If you were asked to define the term project, what words would come to mind? Time? Resources (or lack of)? One-of-a-kind effort? Deliverables or products? Complex? No authority over other groups? Budget? A project is a unique effort to introduce or produce a new product or service conforming to certain specifications and applicable standards. This effort is completed within the project parameters including fixed time, cost, human resources, and asset limits. Projects are said to be similar to the mating of two elephants: They start at a very high level with lots of noise and activity, but it takes forever for anything to materialize! A more serious definition is that a project is a well-organized development of an end product that had a discrete beginning, a discrete end, and a discrete deliverable. Our goal is to help you become more organized as you work toward this objective.