Source: https://monday.com/blog/project-management/guide-to-project-management/

The title of this blog is “What is Project Management? The Complete Guide [2024].” As seen from the title, this blog obviously describes the ins-and-outs of project management. The idea of project management is to manage projects by ensuring that they are delivered on time, within a set budget, and satisfy the needs of the stakeholders. Project management involves setting goals, scheduling, managing, monitoring, and collaboration. This is accomplished through various methodologies such as Agile, Kanban, or Scrum. This is an important field, and topic, because teams of individuals are the ones who provide the greatest projects and products to the market, and without effective leadership and problem solving, they would never come into fruition. Many different organizations employ project managers, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Project management is not exclusive to software engineering though, it can be seen in other sectors such as construction or marketing. “The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) defines ten key project management knowledge areas” them being: scope management, schedule management, procurement management, stakeholder management, risk management, communications management, resource management, quality management, cost management, and integration management. These are all self-explanatory from their names but are very important for being an efficient and effective project manager. There are many different tools used in this field, such as Gantt charts (used for scheduling and tracking tasks in a visual timeline), tasks lists, Kanban boards, calendars, budget trackers, mobile apps, and many others. One might ask if a project is completed and another one is about to be started, is everything created from scratch? The answer is no. Project managers use templates to fill in instructions from prior work to save time when initiating a new project. There are quite a few roles in project management, one being the project manager themself, the project sponsor, the team members, the stakeholders, the customer, the office, and the steering committee (who provides oversight). All of these individuals make the creation of projects operate smoothly.

I chose this particular post about project management because it appeared to be all-encompassing of the topic, and I was correct. After learning about Agile and Scrum methodologies in class, I was interested in learning about the importance of having a project manager in various sized companies. I can appreciate the fact that they have to communicate with stakeholders, engineers, and management in order to ensure smooth operation. Overall this material was very interesting to me because I’ve had an interest in this field for my future career. If I end up pursuing project management, this information would definitely be beneficial for performing my job appropriately. If I don’t, knowing the role of a project manager would be beneficial regardless because I’m bound to work with one regardless. Having an understanding of your coworkers’ roles at your company is important for collaboration. 

From the blog CS@Worcester – Shawn In Tech by Shawn Budzinski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.