Role of Project Management

In today’s competitive market, an essential tool for any organization to meet the business objective and deliver the output of the project at a given time frame by optimizing the use of organizational resources in global societies, is Project Management. Project Management keeps on being an essential focal point or methods for achieving work inside most hierarchical settings all around. Portfolio management is a gathering of projects, programs, sub-portfolios and activities to deal with and accomplish vital objectives and is a connection between the program, project and an association's key arrangement and direction. Major organizations across all the sectors in today’s competitive world are continuously adopting project management tools and techniques to manage project.

The influence of distinctive authoritative structures extends in different ways and changes the method in which they are executed, and this encourages project management to adjust inside these varying hierarchical settings. A lot of variations between different frameworks, such as agile or waterfall is observed and the benefits that each brings to the development process is well stated. Role of project management in today's professional environment: Project Management helps individuals, groups, as well as public and private organizations to meet the business objective, satisfy stakeholders, deliver the output of project in given time frame, resolve the issues within or outside the organization and optimize the use of organizational recourses. It also plays a vital role in the project-oriented organization to achieve quality of the project in the competitive market. In today’s professional environment project management is required in every field due to the wide-spread competition in the global market. An organization needs to deliver quality products, projects, and services to their customer and/or client to sustain in the globally competitive market. “If your organization is not good at project management, you’re putting too much at risk in terms of ultimately delivering on strategy.” (Langley, 2018)

I worked as a supervising engineer with a project manager at Pioneer Project Solutions, India in their Heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) division for 2 years. My job was to deal with site personnel and give them direction as per drawing is given by a client. I also had the responsibility to identify the issue, recover the issue, or terminate failing projects. It had to balance the influence of constraints on the project, manage changes in a better manner. I came across utilizing communication, leadership and management skill from my job for two years. This sparked the idea of project management as an essential skill to cater to reach great heights in the profession. Importance of Project management: Prominent organization across all the sectors in today’s competitive global market have been insistently accepting project management as an approach to budgeting and scheduling the projects. Project Management not only helps in developing the organization but also help to avoid project failure. When recession hit, this field became more critical for the organization in order to implement project management methodology and reduce risks of a project leading to improved success rates and sustain through the economic crisis. Good project management helps organization to identify the projects which might fail due to varied reasons, and develop counteractive measures or methods for the same.

According to ‘PMI white paper’ data; it says that after the 2007 recession; project management practices became more important. Compared to 2007 recession, respondent reported that project planning and due diligence has increased by 40. (PMI, 2010) Role of Project, Program, and Portfolio: Project is defined as a temporary execution to deliver unique objectives and deliverable. An organization can work on multiple projects at a time, which uses their man resources, skills, tools, techniques and knowledge to deliver unique solution at the end of each project. Working on multiple projects at a time to deliver a unique solution which cannot be achieved by working on one project is program management. Program management helps in risk mitigation, economics of scale and easy management. To put it in another words, a project can run individually without being a part of the program but program is always created with multiple projects under it.

A program is a group of an inter-related project run together to achieve efficiency in a project that can’t be achieved by running individually (Meredith, 2017). It helps in risk mitigation, the economics of scale, easy management. A project may or may not be a part of a program whereas a program must be a project. For instance, A MNC Ad Company running various online campaigns such as Facebook promotion, LinkedIn advertising, twitters branding, white paper promotion. Each campaign is treated as a separate project and assigned to a different team. The Company decides to create separate vertical campaign management to manage all these projects together. So Campaign Management is a program here. On contrary; portfolio management is a group of projects, programs, sub-portfolios, and operations to manage a group to achieve strategic goals. The program or project in a portfolio may not be related, but they help in achieving a common organizational goal Project manager and program manager do not have the authority to kill a project whereas a portfolio manager has the power to kill a project.

For example, the production of chloralkali (chemical product) results in release of effluents in terms of hydrogen gas, which is then used for production of phosphoric acid. Hence both of these projects belong to chemical manufacturing plant portfolio. Both of these units require electricity and heat energy to function. Hence, although the electricity production plant project is not directly related to the aforementioned projects, the manufacturing of chemicals depends on the sourcing of adequate amounts of electricity and utilities (steam). Hence the setting up of the electricity generation plant along with the chemical manufacturing unit portfolio can be referred to as a program.

Organizational Structure: Organizational structure helps the project oriented organization to deal with project, program, portfolio and operations in organized way. Project management in different organizational structures are listed below.

Functional organization Structure: In this Structure, work division is based on the primary functionality of the organization. All these divisions work independently and report the work to a functional manager. This functional manager will be responsible for the allocation and monitoring of the work for that functional division. Authority of Project management is little or none. (PMBOK, 2017)

Matrix Organizational Structure: In this structure still functional managers are going to make the final decisions but the project manager will share responsibilities with the functional managers. It is more suitable to bring the balance between ongoing operations and the projects. The project manager has low or none authority in weak and balance matrix whereas moderate authority in the strong matrix. (PMBOK, 2017) Projected Organizational Structure: In this structure, a Project manager has everything under his control for a project. Project Manager receives direct reports from the project team, irrespective of whichever employees of the organization are involved or working in the project. Projected Organizational Structure is more suitable for sizeable and long-term projects. (PMBOK, 2017) Variations between different frameworks: There are various frameworks which we deal with a different project in today's competitive market. Waterfall, PRINCE2, Agile, Lean, etc. are the following frameworks which are used in today completive world. Waterfall: This framework is known as a sequential framework, where the process is executed in the sequential format rather than an iterative cycle through the phases of initiation to closing the project. This framework is easy to implement, each component in the process has defined functionality after which review is performed. This model can effectively implement if the requirement is well defined from the beginning of the project any change in between the cycle cannot be performed. It is not feasible for a large project as a requirement might change due to various conditions, for instance, change in the human behaviour or change in the market. (Shiotsu, 2018)

Agile: This process is known as an iterative process because, in this framework, the project is carefully evaluated and is divided into a number of smaller projects along with which a timeline is fixed for completing each of the smaller tasks. It is suitable for the project which has continuous changes in their requirements. It is easy to go back to the previous state of the method as the review is performed at every stage and suitable changes are made depending on feedback received either from a customer or internal organization. Losses due to change in requirement is negligible as compared to waterfall method. (Shiotsu, 2018). Conclusion: Maybe a couple would debate that we live and work in a competitive world. PMO are confronting high challenge and continuous interruption from exponential innovation; advertise shifts, what's more, social change. Never again is achievement driven by any one single factor—it requires various factors. PMO help more noteworthy achievement and less waste. In coming future role of project management will rise tremendously due to uncertainty in market.