Project Management Square 1

Think on these things…

Renovating the kitchen, organizing a meeting, developing a new product or service, constructing a building or facility, and implementing a new business process are all projects.

Each project will have characteristics of:

Being Temporary. This means there is a defined start and stop time for the event.

Have Unique Deliverable. Resolution of a problem statement is key here. The project must produce a deliverable that can be a product, service or any other result that satisfies a problem, which existed prior to the start of the project.

Being Strange. A project is something new to the individual or organization. This unfamiliarity is not to be feared due to possible encompassing of significant elements of risk.    

Drive Change. An organization (including your family) will not remain the same after completion of a project. The Project Management Book of Knowledge Guide uses the transition diagram below to demonstrate the new state of an organization after completion of a project.

Fig 1-1. PMBOK GUIDE 6th Edition

Before we get too deep into definitions of terms, PMP exams, etcetera, let us take a step back and look at some key dates involving projects and project management. Here we go:

Stonehenge of England, 3000 BC to 2000 BC

Giza Pyramid, 2580 BC to 2560 BC

Great Wall of China, 208 BC

Cathedral of Chartres, France 1194 to 1260

Panama Canal, 1904 to 1914

The Gantt Chart, 1917

Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, 1937

Critical Path Method, 1957

PERT, 1958

WBS, 1962

Project Management Institute, 1969

PMBOK Guide, 1980’s

Congratulations, I have just call-up the Project Management history cell in your brain. As you can see, there are an abundance of references related to different projects that were executed over the years. This is all well but you are probably asking yourself what does this mean to you and the topic of PMP. Over the course of time, I will be dissecting different project management topics and infuse some personal experiences.

As a matter of administrative notes, I am a certified PMP and a member of the PMI. Unbeknown to me, I have been conducting projects since my parents began giving me a grocery list and cash. I was a PM as soon as they told me I had to go grocery shopping but could not go over the budget, and I had to be back in the house by a certain time. Sounds familiar? Growing up in a remote village, there was added challenges to completing this task. There was no motorized mode of transport available to complete this task and selecting the proper produce from the market was always risky. Let me welcome you to the competing constraints of scope, schedule, cost, resources, quality, and risk. Have you ever played the game of see-saw? The constraints are interconnected and any change to one can adversely affect the other factors. The controller can mitigate the effects of a change by adding more of any affected constraint, in order to bring balance back to the equation.

Until next time…

Onwah Campbell, PMP