Project Management

"A project is a problem scheduled to be solved" (Dr. J. M. Juran). This citation briefly describes the highly demanding and complex task of project management. A more technical definition understands the nature of project management as "the entirety of managerial functions, managerial organisation, and managerial techniques and means for the carrying out of a project" (DIN 69 901). Project Management requires organizational skills, the foresight to anticipate the unexpected, and the ability to monitor progress and change course as needed. The use of project management continues to grow in our society and its organizations. Companies nowadays are growing more rapidly but their conservative organisational structure, which is based on functional specialisation, is not able to deal with increasing complex tasks, thus many goals could not be achieved in traditional ways but with project management. This has lead to the fact that businesses are more and more focussing on a more project - oriented approach. Businesses take advantage of project management when unique outcomes have to be accomplished and resources and time are limited. Projects are even more familiar in the service sector, where mostly campaigns, seminars, etc. are structured as projects. Since the massive growth in this field has made project management so popular, many companies nowadays also use it for restructuring. Generally, projects tend to be established for special tasks, e.g. extraordinary order sizes that have to be processed within a sharp time frame. It is also very common to carry out research and development of new products as projects. Of course, almost anything can be organized as a project, no matter how large the scope or money involved is.