Project Management Development

Initiation, the phase during which the scope and nature of the contemplated project are defined. Initiation is often taken to mean, "What are we going to do?" But first, one must answer the question, "Why do we want to do anything?" As Henry David Thoreau put it, "The question is not are we busy but what are we busy about?" The project management initiation phase begins with a listing of the business conditions which the project's end product is supposed to address. A number of potential projects may address any given condition. Plummeting sales, for example, may be addressed by a project which increases sales or one which lays off selected staff. During the initiation phase, the nature of the project to be planned and executed is decided.

Planning and design constitute the second phase of project management development. Having decided to boost sales rather than lay off staff, the next question is what steps will be taken to boost sales. These steps may include new product development (another project in itself), a different advertising campaign, training sales staff to sell more effectively, etc. Having planned what one is going to do to boost sales, the next step is to design the product, ad campaign, training program, etc.

Execution of the resulting plan amounts to actually doing what was designed. Product prototypes are build, tested, modified, standardized, and tried in production. Focus groups are exposed to new advertising and their reactions are measured; the advertising is modified accordingly. Small groups of sales staff receive and execute new training, and their performance is compared to the staff that continues using the old methods. In project management software development, new software is tested on small groups of users and the inevitable bugs and "unintended consequences" are ironed out.

Control and monitoring are performed at every stage of project management development. It is critical to control variables in a product design, such as the headline on an ad, to see how changing one variable affects the overall results. In software development, a small change in the color scheme can result in enhanced productivity because users are able to grasp the information presented on the screen more easily.

Closing a project marks its end. Closing involves review of all results obtained and their comparison to the expectations of all stakeholders going into the project. Unexpected results are examined for serendipitous utility. Results, problems encountered during the project development, and the solutions devised are all documented for possible application to similar future projects.