INF 410 Project Management

The procurement life cycle can be made up into 13 key stages. The stages I am going to follow the CIPS stages of procurement and supply management. (Cips.org, 2017)

Evaluate the importance of understanding the various stages of the project life cycle and its possible contributions to a project.

A project manager must be a skillful planner and can inspire his or her team to produce as needed. Per LaBrosse (2007), project management can be used throughout the organization to boost personal and collaborative productivity by building a standardized system that embeds best practices into the way projects are managed” (p.26).

In the current business environment, the demand for project managers is ever growing. In short, project management is a provisional project constrained by time, cost and scope (A guide to the project management body of knowledge, 2013). Between the immense organization, optimization, and communication assets skilled project management brings to a project, it is easy to see why project management is a booming field of study. Furthermore, project management can be both financially and personally rewarding when long term milestones and goals come to fruition.

Here you need to estimate the duration of a task over a number of days.

Hi Martin, you have provided many critical tasks that need to be performed for successful closure of a project. I would specifically stress about the importance of lesson learned. Often the news of a project closure brings in a state of negative thinking for the members of the project. This negative thinking obstructs them from grasping the opportunity of learning from the failure in the current project, so that they can avoid doing similar mistakes in future projects and drastically improve the chances of being successful the next time. (Shepherd, Patzelt, Williams, & Warnecke, 2014). Further, both rapid termination and delayed termination impacts the learning of the members from the failure. In terms of rapid termination, the resources do

Due to the one month delay, all participants of the project need to meet in one big meeting to set targets, how to catch up the schedule in order to complete the project on time. Everybody at the meeting needs to know how serious the situation is and that everybody has to work harder to recover the lost time. The management of the company can implement awards to give incentives for people who would like to benefit from the extra work.

The project life cycle includes the stages of the project’s development. The basic elements of the cycle include:

Business has changed in the past 20 or so years. Products are being produced more rapidly and with the introduction of globalization competition has become more abundant. There is a need to become more customer focused but at the same time quicker to market while still reducing cost. Doing business the old way is just not cutting it anymore. Project management gives companies the ability to focus on many things at once without losing focus on their core business model. Processes become projects that have a start and finish and can be tracked and quantified

Project Initiation, Project Planning, Project Execution and Project Termination are the four general areas of the project management life cycle. Before defining the project management life cycle one must first understand what a project is. “A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.” (PMI 2013, p. 3). There are companies and organizations that break down all undertakings to projects; however, it must be identified that although management of any set of tasks is required routine tasks that happen continually are processes not projects. Additionally it must be realized that projects have a clear start and end stage, whereas a process will continue beyond the project end into the product life cycle phase. It is also important to note although a project itself will begin and take form during the first project initiation stage that the initial project incubation and feasibility is the predecessor to the life cycle of the project. (Archibald, Filippo, & Filippo 2013). Though simple project will have a single phase project life cycle such as shown in figure 1, more complex projects will have multiple phase project life cycles as shown in figure 2.

Using project management offers a business a way for dealing with considerably lowered phase times. With businesses operating internationally projects that can have an effect on the company as a whole are not easy to manage without a proper line of attack. For this, project management would help cross functional teams to be more successful.

Jeffrey K. Pinto and Om P. Kharbanda recognize the importance of project management within the modern day society and not only at the level of the business community, but also at the level of other sectors, such as health care, legislation and so

This type of termination is the most common way of dealing with successful projects, and the most complex

Project management is a series of steps taken in sequence to manage a project through all phases from conception to completion. The steps are documented in a strategic plan. The plan is used to ensure that all parties are working towards a common goal. Project management requires applying knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to specific activities in accordance with established standards and guidelines. There are five basic functions of project management: planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling. Basic activities of project management include: identifying project requirements to define the outcomes; addressing various needs, concerns and expectations of others; setting up, maintaining and carrying out communications; managing others; creating project deliverables; and balancing competing project constraints.

Project lifecycle is the series of activities that are necessary to fulfill the project’s objectives. There are projects of different size or complexity, with different aims and goals, but, in general, all projects have the following structure: