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Project Management

Notes
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Caution A project is a complex activity and thus, it end-term project objectives. Thus,
careful coordination and control is required for successful completion of the project.

2.2.5 Delivery and Deliverables

There is a word that project managers and people involved regularly in projects use all the time;
it is delivery. Delivery in the context of projects simply means getting the things done you set
out to do. The role of a project manager is therefore to deliver the project. Delivery is a useful
piece of jargon as it saves having to write ‘completing the project to the expected time and cost
with the desired outcome’ again and again!
Deliverables are what is delivered by a project so taking the examples above, the deliverables
from the respective projects are a new house, a new computer system or a new product. In a
project the deliverables wanted are defined at the start of the project, and your success as a
project manager is in delivering them in the planned time and to the expected cost.

Did u know? The aim of project management is to ensure that projects are completed and
that the end point (the new house, computer system or new product) is achieved.

2.2.6 Overlapping of Activities

Projects often interact with other projects being carried out simultaneously by their parent
organization; but projects always interact with the parent organization’s standard, ongoing
operations. Although the functional departments of an organization (marketing, finance,
manufacturing, and the like) interact with one another in regular, patterned ways, the patterns
of interaction between projects and these departments tend to be changeable. Marketing may be
involved at the beginning and end of a project, but not in the middle. Manufacturing may have
major involvement throughout. Finance is often involved at the beginning and accounting at
the end, as well as at periodic reporting times. The PM must keep all these interactions clear and
maintain the appropriate interrelationships with all external groups.

Notes Project Initiation is the first phase in the Project Life Cycle and essentially involves
starting up the project. You initiate a project by defining its purpose and scope, the
justification for initiating it and the solution to be implemented. You will also need to
recruit a suitably skilled project team, set up a Project Office and perform an end of Phase
Review.

2.2.7 Sharing of Resources

More than most managers, the PM lives in a world characterized by conflict. Projects compete
with functional departments for resources and personnel. More serious, with the growing
proliferation of projects, is the project versus project conflict for resources within multi-project
organizations. The members of the project team are in almost constant conflict for the project’s
resources and for leadership roles in solving project problems.
There is much discussion about whether there is only one ‘true’ model of a project life cycle or
many, and whether any of these are reasonably accurate descriptions of what happens in real

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