Subtitles of the Movie

Defining project management is not always an easy undertaking and that's because if you ask ten people, you'll get ten very different answers. In this movie, I will define project management in terms of the PMBOK Guide. Let me preface this by saying that the project management field itself has grown tremendously over the years and it's now a full-fledged profession. Many have called it an art, and others a science. A Project Manager can cause a project to succeed or to fail and if you aren't yet immersed in projects, this course overall will shed light on the large responsibility that comes with managing a project. The PMBOK Guide defines project management as the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements. In other words, it involves planning, organizing, monitoring and controlling the project activities in order to accomplish the project requirements. Essentially what we're talking about here are the five process groups and we'll be going over those in great detail later on in this course. Therefore, it makes sense to think of the Project Manager as being responsible for accomplishing the project of objectives. The Project Manager is like the conductor of a large orchestra, making sure that each section plays its part at the right time in the right way and that all flow together in synch as a whole. As you can see, project management is far more than managing a project schedule, which is what many people tend to think that Project Managers do, when in actuality, the project schedule is just one of the many things involved in the project management process. Managing a project involves the following: identifying the requirements and establishing clear objects, managing competing priorities and meeting stakeholder expectations. Let's back track and briefly review these three items. The first is fairly self-explanatory. Without the complete requirements and clear objectives, the project is likely to fail. The second, managing competing priorities refers to different aspects of project management that will tend to compete with one another, such as time, cost, scope and quality. For example, you may be asked to increase your scope, which would bring your project over budget and delayed or you may be asked to cut quality in order to meet a deadline. At times it'll seem that these aspects are sacrificed as a result of the other. Although you may not know it right now, what we're discussing is something called the triple constraint. The triple constraint includes scope, time and cost. When any one of these three is affected, the others will also be affected. Of course, this is why planning is such an important ingredient in project management. I won't go into too much detail in regards to the third, meeting stakeholder expectations, since we'll be discussing stakeholders in the next movie. But I will clarify the stakeholders are those that have a vested interest within the project and that a Project Manager has a responsibility to the stakeholders and to ensuring that their expectations have been met. And that wraps up our definition of project management. As we move further through the course and the courses that follow, the concept of project management and the processes that are involved will continue to fall into place.