Project Management Processes

Management in general is often described as planning, organizing, leading and control. Project management draws heavily on general management and utilises many of the principles of general management. However, project management differs from general and other types of management to allow focus on schedule, budget and quality of the deliverables, to deal with the complexity inherent to projects and to provide the flexibility required by projects.

Effective project management not only necessitates the use of the powerful tools and techniques that have been developed, but also requires a disciplined team and first-rate leadership on the part of the project manager.

An important difference between project management and other forms of management is that a project has a definite start and a well-defined end. That necessitates project initiation and project closure.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) in the USA describes project management as the following five groups of processes: 

• Initiating processes;
• Planning processes;
• Executing processes;
• Monitoring and controlling processes; and
• Closing processes

How much time should the project team spend on each of these processes? It certainly depends on the type of project, but Andy Crowe found that, as indicated in Table 1.1 below, the best project managers spend more time on certain processes than other project managers.

Table 1.1 Time spent on project management processes

Excerpt from: Project Management – a multi-disciplinary approach, edited by Herman Steyn.

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