The Project Management Institute (PMI) gives us a really good definition of project management, so let’s start with that.

Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements.  It’s the practice of planning, organizing, and executing the tasks needed to turn a brilliant idea into a tangible product, service, or deliverable. – PMI

A project manager uses various tools and techniques to manage the project through to completion. Project management has some core principals that are required for all projects. If you’re going to subscribe to PMI’s framework for project management, that means that you will need to start with a Project Charter which authorizes the work.

• The charter can take many forms, but it generally includes the start and end dates, the sponsor, stakeholders, risks, assumptions, and a definition of the project at the deliverables.

Deliverables

Your deliverables are the things that you want to leave your customer with at the end of the project. If the project scope is to install a new HR SAAS solution, then one of the key deliverables will be the new system itself. Your deliverables may include new workflows and automations to make work easier and integrations with other systems to aggregate data.

Risk Management

Another key component to project management is the ability to define and mitigate risks. Risk management is a whole thing unto itself. Indeed, Risk Management can be an entire career path. As part of project management, we have tools that we can use to analyze a project for risks and develop a plan to deal with each one of them.

Communication

Lastly, communication is paramount. You can’t complete a project without communication.

• You need to communicate with your team.
• You need to facilitate communication within your team and with other teams.
• You need to communicate with and between stakeholders.
• Communication can be emails, in person meetings, virtual meetings, instant messages, verbal, etc.
• Communication involves thinking about how you are going to communicate effectively with people.

Communication takes up 90% of a project manager’s time. It is d absolutely a requirement for any project manager. The organizations that have truly highly effective communicators, they hit their project targets 80% of the time.

TL:DR

• Project management is a professional discipline of managing project work with various tools and techniques.
• Risk management is vital to keep a project on track.
• Project management is A LOT of communication and working with people.

Photo by Paymo on Unsplash

Want to learn more? Check out my corresponding video at https://www.youtube.com/@YourProjectProPM