Years Worked as Project Manager
Richard White is the project manager at Ecosolve International, which is a wastewater treatment facility. He has a Master of Science in Water Resources Engineering and has seven years of experience in water resources engineering in addition to 5 years of project management experience.
Purpose of Project Management
Project management is an essential activity for running any business and its assured success. Project management is responsible for the planning and organization of the project, and this includes ensuring the project meets the stipulated set timelines, the budget provided fits, and also the feasibility of the project. For a successful project, key principles are maintained, and they include setting the required skills for the project, a properly defined budget, timelines for the project phases, the culture of the working team, how work will be completed, and reports on project progress to the stakeholders.
Is Project Management Respected?
Project management is a well-respected field and job. Richard describes project management as a steadily growing field that is getting more important currently as it helps improve internal communication, save money, and make better-informed business decisions.
Benefits of Project Management
White says good project management has allowed the business to only focus on the core work without many thoughts on distractions caused by budget mismatches resulting from accounting for unbudgeted activities and costs. Project management has been essential in strategic alignment; that is, what has been delivered has real value. Clear focus and objective have been achieved since the project team has a leader and objective, which ensures there is accountability. Another key factor is that it ensures potential associated risks are properly analyzed and mitigated. Project management also gives room for continuous project oversight and subject matter expertise. All these permit the businesses to deliver their mission and meet their set targets.
Challenges With Project Management
Major challenges with project management have been budget changes whereby the project does not fit within the provided budget. As a result, the project ends up straying from the agreed-upon budget, and the goal is not achieved. Another challenge has been on team communication; team conflict and bad communication trickle down to poor allocation of tasks, lack of cooperation, and alienation of the stakeholders. Resulting miscommunication leads to confusion and the dismal performance of the business.
Primary Project Management Approach Used
The agile approach has been the main methodology used in his business. It involves the breakdown of the project into different phases and constant collaboration with the project parties. This has given room for continuous improvement in every stage of the project in planning, working, and evaluation.
Other Approaches Used
The traditional approach had been used previously, and it involved the completion of each stage at a time. This came in when designing the piping system, as they could not bypass the water supply system connecting the reservoir and the storage tanks. The approach, however, had limitations since the requirements of the project were not well defined.
Three Project Management Approaches
Three project management approaches are the traditional approach, the agile approach, and the hybrid approach. The traditional project management approach aims at applying skills, tools, knowledge, and techniques in order to route activities to comply with project requirements. In addition, it involves five phases that have clearly documented and understood features which include initiating, planning, execution, monitoring, and controlling, which must be completed. The projects aim at reducing risks and constraints of money and time.
The agile project management approach is a comprehensive method whose foundation includes emphasis on flow and value generation, the inclusion of management in an organization, communication, and action. Agile projects tend to discover the complete project requirements by doing the project in phases, and this eliminates the uncertainties in the project, with the main goal being on delivery of the product rather than adherence to the project timeline (Zavyalova et al., 2020). A hybrid project management approach involves the combination of practices of more than one approach. It identifies a set of common project management practices for all that must be assured and adopted. That is, to have project management practices that are optional and useful project management practices that are adopted by project teams, divided into traditional and agile approaches.
My Recommendation
I would recommend a hybrid project management approach which is a combination of an adaptive and a predictive lifecycle. Whereby when the elements of the project are clearly known, a traditional approach should be used while working on a new project, and its elements are evolving the agile approach to be used. In cases where project activities and requirements are not only predictable but also the events and risks associated with the project are controllable, the traditional project approach complements the agile approach. In an alternative case where the project scope is based on revenue increase and market share, the agile approach works well over the traditional approach; that is, the Agile approach concentrates on defining the requirement and scope of the project, and therefore it will prioritize the value.
Reference
Zavyalova, E., Sokolov, D., & Lisovskaya, A. (2020). Agile vs. traditional project management approaches: Comparing human resource management architectures. International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 28(5), 1095-1112. Web.