Principles of Project Management

Having a clear understanding of the principles of project management is fundamental for those wanting a career in the profession. It is after all these project management principles which provide the foundation to every project which is managed and correlates quite closely to the project scope triangle.

These are the 4 principles which all project manager's should bear in mind:

1.0 Project Scope

Having a clear project scope statement which details the project scope is a clear and unambiguous way is one of the vital principles of project management. Of course this is alot easier said than done, which is why so many projects suffer from scope creep and never end up delivered.

2.0 Project Time

The timeframes on a project are always tight , but for successful project management, a project manager must know how to get projects delivered to really tight schedules and project time and cost.

You need to be able to think laterally and be a creative problem solver to do this. However with the Credit Crunch these are becoming more and more vital to have as project schedules are tightened further and further.

3.0 Project Quality

There is project quality which I would take to mean, having quality code and an end product which works as required. There is also the whole project quality plan which deals with the documentation part of project management.

This is important but the reality is that any Organisation would take quality code and a product which works over and above faultless paperwork and a duff deliverable.

4.0 Project Budget

This is probably the least important of the principles of project management. The reason being that whilst you will be asked numerous questions and exception reports should your project be forecast to go outside stated tolerance levels in the project initiation document, the reality is that if your project is imp;18ortant enough, the money will be found to increase your project budget.

So keep a close eye on your budget, but remember that as long as you have good reasons this can be increased if you make a compelling enough argument.

Principles of Project Management - Tip

You will notice that I have made no mention of any kind of planning, in my list of project management principles above. The reason for this is that you might think that knowing how to write a project plan, or being able to detail project resource planning

In reality these skills merely help you in delivering your project, but if for example you are clueless in Microsoft Project and can only knock up a plan on a piece of paper, you will still successfully deliver as long as you ensure the principles of project management above are adhered to.

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