"Pyramid Project" to "Polaris Missile Project"
On the origin of project management, it is actually very early. The success of famous great engineering projects in ancient times, such as the pyramids and the Great Wall, contributed to the strict and scientific management of engineering projects at that time. In the early 1960s, under the advocacy of Professor Hua, a famous mathematician, the concept of project management was introduced into China and applied to all sectors of the national economy at that time. This method was named "Overall Planning Method". Later, the Institute of Management Science and Technology Policy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences also took the lead in establishing the "China Research Society for Overall Optimization and Economic Mathematics". After the reform and opening up, project management has been widely used in water conservancy, construction, chemical industry and other fields. At the end of 2000, in the process of developing "Apocalypse" and "Tianlin" computer products, Lenovo combined with the needs of business for project management, and used the relevant theories and methods of project management to compile a software scheme, which enabled the project to be completed within 8 months and reached the highest level of PC production technology in the world.
Nine knowledge systems and five specific stages
Early project management mainly focused on cost, schedule (time), and later extended to quality. In recent ten years, project management has gradually developed into an independent discipline branch covering 9 knowledge systems and 5 specific stages.
9 The knowledge system includes:
Integrated management in project analysis, the project manager must integrate various abilities and coordinate their application.
Scope management defines the boundaries of the project and pays attention to the "big picture". For example, the project life cycle, the formulation of work division structure, and the implementation of management process changes.
Time management needs to develop planning skills. Experienced project managers should know how to get the project back to plan when it deviates from the plan.
Cost management requires project managers to cultivate business skills and deal with such matters as cost estimation, planning and budgeting, cost control, capital budgeting and basic financial settlement.
Human resource management focuses on people's management ability, including conflict handling, promotion of employees' work motivation, efficient organizational structure planning, team work and team formation, interpersonal skills and so on.
Risk management requires managers to make decisions with incomplete information. Risk management model usually includes three steps: risk determination, risk impact analysis and risk response plan.
Quality management requires the project manager to be familiar with basic quality management techniques. For example, making and interpreting quality control charts, implementing the 80: 20 rule, and striving to achieve zero defects.
Procurement management project managers should have strong contract management skills. For example, we should be able to understand the risks implied by the pricing contract relative to the "cost plus profit" contract. You should know the key legal principles of signing a contract.
Communication management requires project managers to communicate effectively with their managers, customers, manufacturers and subordinates.
These five stages are: project start-up, project planning, project execution, project control and project end.
In addition, as a well-known project management professional, one must have corresponding general management knowledge and experience, relevant business knowledge background and profound risk management experience. In other words, the project manager should be a senior compound talent with rich knowledge and reasonable knowledge structure.
Now, project management is widely used by governments, large companies, enterprises and small non-profit organizations all over the world. At the same time, managers with project management experience and project leadership ability have become hot in the workplace. Because global competition requires that the development of new projects and new businesses be completed on time within the budget.
Effective project management
A project is a temporary activity to achieve a special purpose. Each project has a clear start and end time, and projects can be created by all levels of the organization; The number of participants can be one person or thousands; It can only involve a single department or cross-departmental cooperation. Project management is applicable to any project, regardless of its scale, budget or duration, such as:
Develop new products or services; ?
Design a new model; ?
Carry out political campaigns;
Build a bridge;
Launch a Mars probe;
Establish an e-commerce website.
So, what is project management? According to the definition of PMBOK2000, project management is an activity that uses relevant knowledge, tools and technologies to meet customers' requirements for specific projects. The project manager is responsible for managing the whole project. His main tasks are:
Strike the best balance between project scope, time, cost, risk and quality;
Meet the different needs and expectations of different project stakeholders;
Achieve the established demand goals.
Ideally, all enterprises can benefit from project management, especially in managing capital investment and indirect activities. In today's rapidly changing and globalized market environment, all types of enterprises need to see the returns and benefits of their investment in fixed assets facilities, real estate construction and some equipment upgrades, or manage and track some internal functions, such as IT projects and market projects. No matter what industry, project management can enable enterprises to improve productivity and reduce costs through better information sharing, and deliver products and services faster and lower with limited resources, thus increasing revenue. Project management can help enterprises realize customers' expectations by standardizing their daily work and reducing tasks that may be forgotten or neglected. Project management can also make full use of existing resources in the most effective way; Project management can also give senior managers insight into what is happening and will happen in the organization.
The application of project management principles can help senior management:
Establish a measure of success;
Customer-centric, consistent with customers;
Quantify the cost of embodying value;
Optimize the use of organizational resources;
Implementing quality principles and standards;
Implement the strategic plan; ?
Shorten the development cycle of new products and enter the market quickly.
Many enterprises and organizations around the world, such as NASA, IBM, AT & amp； & ampt, Siemens, Chiyoda, PricewaterhouseCoopers, etc. Everyone uses project management to manage the innovation process, plan, organize and control strategic activities, monitor the performance of enterprises, analyze major deviations and predict their impact on the organization.
Facing popularization and moving towards cooperation.
In the fierce competition environment, facing all kinds of complex projects, there are a lot of information and data that need to be managed dynamically. In order to improve the management level and work efficiency, advanced methods and tools must be adopted. Statistics show that about 90% American project managers have used project management software to varying degrees. Among them, some are oriented to plan and schedule management, some are based on network environment information, some are controlled around three coordinates of time, cost and quality, and some are managed through information resource system.
In the past ten years, project management has been widely used, because our working environment has changed as follows:
Intensive (fewer people and more things); ?
Projects and services become larger and more complex;
Intense global competition;
The popularity of the network;
Customers' demand for high-quality products and services is increasingly diversified;
Rapid updating of new technologies;
Multinational companies implement unified management of project management.
At present, project management has expanded from being suitable for managing a certain project to adopting the theory and method of project management to manage the whole business activities. Many enterprises plan to adopt project management to make their organizations more effective, agile and controllable. Through project management, enterprises hope to obtain information that can only be obtained in typical financial cost control centers, such as monitoring project performance and progress daily or weekly, making rectification and changes according to priorities and business conditions, and clearly dividing business responsibilities, which is greatly conducive to the agile response and controllability of the organization.
Now, more and more enterprises facing fierce competition realize that they should allocate highly specialized and lean labor more effectively; Begin to understand the importance of better cooperation between project teams in project management; I also realized that through project management, senior management and project leaders can better share information.
So, what is the future development trend of project management?
First of all, we will see that more and more enterprises begin to accept the idea of project management and use the technology and methods of project management to manage it.
Second, in order to realize the full potential of project management, many enterprises will train their project managers and project teams and encourage them to obtain professional certification. At the same time, setting standards should not only ensure the success of the project team, but also ensure the continuous success at the company level.
Thirdly, turning to project management will make enterprises not only care about integration, but also consider collaboration and project intelligence when looking for project management systems. An integrated system can enable enterprises to manage the whole project life cycle with minimal efforts; However, the project management system with collaboration function can provide access and visualization functions for all project stakeholders (partners, customers, contractors and other project stakeholders), so collaboration becomes more important.