The Ministry of Education

Umm Al-Quraa University

College of Business

Project Management Course

Collected and prepared by:
Ms. Faddia H. Aljhany

9\2020

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 CHAPTER1:
Introduction to the Project Manag

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 Chapter1: Introduction to the Project Management

1- Project Management
A- About the Art and Science of Project!
Management Project management has two major aspects:
• The art—leading the people on the project.
• The science—defining and coordinating the work to be done.
The art of project management relates to the fact
that projects are really about people getting things done. Project
management requires a keen knowledge of human behavior and the ability to skillfully
apply appropriate interpersonal skills.
The second aspect the knowledge, understanding, and skillful application of
a prescribed project management process. This process is intended to guide project
managers and project teams in effectively performing key process steps, such as
identifying the true need, defining the project objective, creating an execution schedule,
and maintaining control throughout the entire project. The basic premise of the process is
the development of a set of graphic tools, documents, and techniques, all aimed at
facilitating project success.
❏ Generally speaking, the project manager’s job is not intellectually challenging, but it is
complex and broad. It requires a large variety of different skills—many of which will be
new to you.
B- What is project?
By definition, a project is temporary in nature; that means that it has a specific start and
finish. A project consists of a well-defined collection of small jobs (tasks) and ordinarily
culminates in the creation of an end product or products (deliverables). There will be a
preferred sequence of execution for the project’s tasks (the schedule).

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 A project is a unique, one-time undertaking; it will never again be done
exactly the same way, by the same people, and within the same environment. This is a
noteworthy point, as it suggests that you will rarely have the benefit of a wealth of
historical information when you start your project. You’ll have to launch your project with
limited information or, worse yet, misinformation.
There will always be some uncertainty associated with your project. This
uncertainty represents risk—an ever-present threat to your ability to make definitive plans
and predict outcomes with high levels of confidence. All of your projects consume
resources—resources in the form of time, money, materials, and labor. One of your
primary missions is to serve as the overall steward of these resources—to apply them as
sparingly and as effectively as possible.
So, there’s a general definition or explanation. Here are some examples of
projects: introducing a new product to the marketplace, building and installing a piece of
equipment, and running a political campaign.
In contrast, the following activities are not projects: operating a
manufacturing facility, supervising a work group, and running a retail business. These
activities are ongoing. At the most basic level, a project is actually the response to a need,
the solution to a problem. Further, it’s a solution that promises a benefit—typically a
financial benefit. The fundamental purpose for most projects is to either make money or
save money.
An official definition of project management, courtesy of the Project
C- What is Project Management?
Management Institute, defines the term as: “the application of knowledge, skills, tools and
techniques to project activities to meet project requirements.
It is also “A temporary endeavor undertaken to achieve a particular aim.”
Whichever specific definition you choose, nearly every project you manage will have
many of the same characteristics.

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 In order to really get our heads around these definitions, we need to discuss
some of the terms. A project is distinguished from regular work in that it’s a one-time
effort to change things in some way. So the creation of a new web site would be a project;
ongoing maintenance and minor updates would not.
Time and budget are familiar terms—perhaps the project is intended to take
six weeks and have a budget of $20,000. Scope refers to the magnitude of the work to be
performed. It is a list of deliverables or features that have been agreed—this is where the
scale of the required solution is identified. For instance, creating a new web site for the
company may realistically be possible in six weeks, but rewriting all the accounting
software isn’t. Cost is the cost of project work, directly related to the human and physical
resources applied. Quality is exactly what it says on the tin, but in project-speak, quality
may include not only the quality of the finished product, but also the approach. Some
industries require that particular quality management approaches be used—for instance,
factories producing automotive parts have to meet particular international standards.

• Deliverables: Tangible ‘things’ that the project produces

D- Common Project Terms:
• Milestones: Dates by which major activities are performed.
• Tasks: Also called Actions. Activities undertaken during the project
• Risks: Potential problems that may arise
• Issues: Risks that have happened
• Gantt Chart: A specific type of chart showing time and tasks. Usually created by a
Project Management program like MS Project.
• Stakeholder: Any person or group of people who may be affected by your project

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E- The Project Manager:
A person with a diverse set of skills – management, leadership, technical,
conflict management, and customer relationship – who is responsible for: – initiating, –
planning, – executing, – controlling, – monitoring, – and closing down a project.
Project Managers must make sure that everything keeps to task, that potential issues are
quickly eliminated and the project is delivered on time, all the while making sure everyone
knows what is happening and the project quality and budget are acceptable.
Specifically they:
direct all activities required to successfully meet the project objectives.
manage risk – scanning ahead for potential issues and resolving them before
they become a problem
solve problems - recommending alternative approaches to problems that
arise and providing guidance to the Project Sponsor
track and report project progress
communicate to all stakeholders in the project.
A successful Project Manager must simultaneously manage the four basic
elements of a project: resources, time, money, and most importantly, scope. All these
elements are interrelated. Each must be managed effectively. All must be managed
together if the project is to be a success. The resource that can be leveraged to the
greatest extent in all projects is the people involved.

1- Skill Requirements of the Project Manager

To fulfill the responsibilities described above and handle the challenges you’ll face, you’ll
need very diverse skills and a wealth of knowledge. So what knowledge and skills does it
take to be an effective project manager? to break it down into four major knowledge and
skill categories:

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 1. Project management process skills
2. Interpersonal and behavioral skills
3. Technology management skills
4. Desired personal traits
Project Management Process Skills Project management process skills
(sometimes called the “hard skills”) are knowledge and skills related to the mechanics of
project management. You should be extremely knowledgeable about project management
tools, techniques, and process technology and be able to apply them.
Interpersonal and Behavioral Skills Since managing projects is all about getting
things done through other people, your skills in dealing with people are of immeasurable
value. Closely tied to your interpersonal skills are your behavioral skills: your
personal conduct, style, and approach. Together, these two skill sets are often called the
“soft skills.” Here are some examples of soft skills:
• Team and individual leadership
• Oral and written communication
• Conflict resolution
• Negotiation
• Influencing
• Delegating
• Coaching and mentoring
Technology Management Skills Most projects have one or more embedded
technologies. An embedded technology refers to the process or technology areas at the
core of the project. Examples might include software development, chemical processing,
or commercial construction. Your ability to guide and coordinate the application of these
technologies is crucial to your success as a project manager.

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 Desired Personal Traits Many studies
have been performed to correlate personality
traits to success as a project manager.

2- But how should you develop that capability?

ls, soft skills, functional competencies, and personal traits compose the raw material for your ove

As this figure illustrates, skills that are somewhat mechanical can be

learned or developed through self-study, reading, or facilitated training and practice.
Many of the hard skills fall into this category. However, as you migrate toward the soft
skills, the preferred mode of development moves from programmed learning to coaching
or mentoring. Here, soft skills are best developed through observation and feedback from
others— preferably those in a position to do so. Further to the left in Figure are
personality traits. At the far left are those traits that make up the very fabric of your
personality and affect your behavior and conduct on a very basic level, such as your
belief system and moral values. On this end of the development continuum, the prospect
of self-improvement becomes very personal. In fact, as you approach the far left, it’s
likely that you can develop only by being introspective—through self-examination and
self-analysis.

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3- Why You Need PM Skills?
Projects are an increasing feature of modern work. Once, workers performed
the same set of tasks, day after day, focusing on getting more of the same done as quickly
and efficiently as possible. Today, one of the few constants is that the work you do today
will be different from what you do tomorrow. For many, our jobs consist of an ongoing
stream of new projects, new technologies, and new challenges.
This is particularly true in our modern world, where technology is an intrinsic part of
almost any business. These days, it’s hard to imagine a company that could survive with
your telephones, email, computers, and handhelds. It’s even harder to imagine technology
staying the same for more than a few years—at the most!
We also face changing expectations among our clients and business partners.
Today, there’s much more of an expectation that you will deliver not just an isolated
product, but a solution to a business problem. Delivering that full solution
requires a broader skillset than was traditionally expected.
First and foremost, developing your project management skills will
empower you to deliver the real solution that your customers and clients want. You’ll be
able to manage everything, from start to finish—including their involvement—in a much
more effective manner.
Secondly, investing some time in project management will make everything
else run more smoothly. In fact, you’ll hopefully find that instead of detracting from the
real work, your new-found project management skills will allow you more time to focus
on the work that you really enjoy, by making managing the process aspects of your job
much less stressful. You never know—project management might even become the work
that you love best!
Thirdly, project management is one of those valuable transferable skills that
careers advisors are always so keen on. Wherever you see your career going, there aren’t a

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lot of places in which project management wouldn’t be a bonus. If you find that you like it
enough to want to make it the focus of your career, you might consider investing in
professional qualifications.
Project leadership requires the use of many different skill sets. It involves
tasks of limitless variety. You must live by a curious combination of process compliance
and individual judgment, of gut feelings and data, of people and things. The challenge is
enormous. So if you feel mentally prepared to accept this challenge, you’re well on your
way to becoming a successful project manager. The only thing left is to learn how to do it
the right way.

F-Measuring Project Success:

We measure the success of a project using 4 major project constraints,
specifically: –Scope –Cost –Schedule (Time) –Customer satisfaction
(quality and performance).
The balance quadrant demonstrates the interrelationship between the
four aspects and how a change to one aspect will unbalance the
quadrant. For instance, an increase in the project’s scope will have an impact on the time,
the cost, and the quality of the project. In practice, any project decision you or your clients
make will have an impact on these four aspects—will it make the project more expensive,
take longer, be of lower or higher quality, or affect its scope?

Essentially, project management is a set of skills and tools that will help you

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G- Characteristics of Projects:
A project contains a well defined objective. The project objective is defined in
terms of scope ( or requirements), schedule, and cost.
• A project is carried out via a set of interdependent tasks.
• A project uses various resources to carry out these tasks.
• A project has a definite start date and an expected completion date. The actual
completion date may not always be the same as the expected date.
• A project is a one time or unique endeavor.
• A project has a customer.

• Project scope – Have all the project requirements (i.e., deliverables) been completed?
H- Project Constraints:
• Project cost – Is the cost of the project close to the amount the customer has agreed to
pay?
• Schedule – Was the project completed on time?
• Customer satisfaction – Is the customer happy with the quality of the project?

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2- What Project Management isn’t !
Firstly, project management is not personal productivity.
Secondly, project management is not people management.
Thirdly, project management is not operations or service management. The
challenges and best practices for ongoing day-to-day operations are very different from
those involved in project management. An incident in a live system has to be dealt with in
a very different way from an issue on your project.

The generic project life cycle is fairly simple—first you start the project
3- Understanding the Project Life Cycle?
(called Initiating), then you go on to actually do the project (through the Planning,
Executing, and Controlling phases, which form a loop), and finally you finish with
everyone happy, a strategy for the future in place, and a check in your hand (Closing).
Most people spend most of the project time working
in the Executing and Controlling phases—actually
doing the tasks, building the product, and making sure
everything is on track. Of course, this work is hugely
valuable— there wouldn’t be much point starting the
project at all—but these phases aren’t typically where
the success or failure of a project is dictated. That

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happens in the other three phases—Initiating, Planning, and Closing—which makes them
the most important phases of all.

But why are Initiating, Planning, and Closing so important?

The way to think about this is to imagine the repercussions
if these phases were completed badly or even ignored completely.

A-If Initiating isn’t Done Right!

You often end up in a situation where the project team members have very
different ideas. The Initiating phase provides an opportunity to ensure that everyone in the
team is on the same page from the start, and that misconceptions and conflicts are
addressed, rather than left to fester. Good initiation will also ensure that you identify all
the project stakeholders (all those who are involved, interested in, or affected by the
project) up-front, which avoids the likelihood that they’ll pop up at inopportune moments
during the project!

B- Failing in the Planning Phase Can be Equally Disastrous for Your Project!
If you don’t plan at all, how will you know what you should be doing next?
Similarly, planning once at the beginning of the project, and expecting just to be able to
follow that plan, is both wonderfully naïve and seriously dangerous. Unless you’re far
more prescient than the rest of us, it’s incredibly difficult to plan what should be done on
Tuesday three months from now.
The best planning approach tends to be one that lets you plan the project’s
immediate future in detail, and plan tasks that lie further out at a higher level. This is
known as the rolling wave approach to planning. The deliverables for the next three to
four weeks are broken down into sections, so that it’s possible to keep track of the
project’s progress on a day-to-day basis. Anythingfurther off than a month is left

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unplanned, as a high-level deliverable, so that you can keeping an eye on what lies ahead
with Your becoming overly focused on the minute details.

It can be just as problematic as poor initiating or planning. If you think your

C- Not Paying Proper Attention to the Closure of Your Project
project is finished when you finish building the product, then you’re in for a nasty
surprise: what I call zombie stakeholders, who keep coming back, again and again, asking
for “just one more change,” or insisting that you fix remaining bugs and issues that they
find. Part of finishing a project with excellence is making sure that the product you’ve
built has a future.
If you’re inclined to pick up support contracts for all the projects you
implement, you need to execute the Closing phase. If you intend to hand over the future
maintenance and support of the product to someone else—perhaps a person who’s internal
to your customer’s organization—then, again, this needs care. Just throwing the work over
the fence to them and wandering off to your next project will almost guarantee
dissatisfaction on one side or the other eventually.
4- Why Do Projects Fail?
1. Poor project and program management discipline.
2. Lack of executive-level support.
3. Wrong team members.
4. Poor communication.
5. No measures for evaluating the success of the project.
6. No risk management.
7. Inability to manage change.

5- What are the particular management challenges facing projects?

o Requirements hard to define and may evolve

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 o Risk Management (all aspects) crucial but difficult
o Cross functional team composition
o Competing pressures on resources, e.g. design office
o Working with scientific organisations not used to project and disciplines 
planning may be poor
o Collaborative agreements rather than contracts
o Political - EC funding requirements
6- Negative Perceptions of Project Management!
Some unfortunate misperceptions make project management rate on most
people’s list of preferred activities somewhere between putting the garbage out and
deliberately stubbing their big toes—that is, somewhere between tedious and painful.

It Takes Too Long !

The second misperception that drives people’s view of project management
is that it takes a huge amount of time. This can be true. If you try to do everything that
traditional project management demands, you can certainly feel like managing your
projects is turning into a full-time job. What is needed is a balance between the science of
project management (what you’re told you should do) and the art of project management
(what you actually need to do). In this book, we’ll focus on the minimalist side of the art:
the judicious application of the right tools in the right situations is the hallmark of a great
project manager.
It’s Too Hard!
The other negative perception of project management is that it’s just plain
difficult. Why is project management so scary? One reason is that project management is
talked about far less than other topics. Although it’s easy to argue that most people will
need to manage a project of some sort at some point in their lives, it’s still not an area
that’s generally covered at school or even at college.

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Another reason for the perception that project management is so difficult is that many
project management tools are complicated!
Project management can also be a world of its own, complete with
acronyms, jargon, slang, and in-jokes. In fact, some project managers rely on this,
overusing the terminology to make their jobs seem more mystical. Others just enjoy the
fact that project management seems to have created a whole new category of Dilbert
cartoons and try not to imitate them too much.

7- Choosing the Right Tools and Processes is the PM’s Most Important Job!
Which tools to use, how to communicate with your team and your clients,
and how best to design your work processes—among other things! Making the right
decisions about which processes and tools you’ll use is going to be your most important
job as a project manager.
Project management isn’t about going it alone and creating all the artifacts
(the plans, schedules, issue lists, status updates, and so on) by yourself. It’s about running
the project; those artifacts should be no more—or less—than useful and effective by-
products of a project that’s going well.
Choosing or designing the right processes and finding the tools to support
them is going to be your biggest challenge as a project manager. Don’t think of any of the
decisions you make about the project as being trivial. Understand the importance and the
implications of each choice, and be prepared to change when something isn’t working
well. Take responsibility not only for introducing the tools, but also for marshaling their
adoption. And above all, watch out for signs of a deeper problem—the times when no
extra features or better performance will improve the adoption of a given tool or approach,
because the underlying processes are broken. Equally, look for opportunities or fluctuations
—tools that really helped a new team that hadn’t gelled at the beginning of the project
could become obsolete as their collaboration improves.

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8- What Can You Expect to Encounter “Out There”?
Although you won’t often see it addressed in project management reference
books, the reality is that mental preparedness may prove to be just as critical to your
ultimate success as a project manager as your knowledge base or skill set. And gaining a
sound understanding of what’s involved in this new role is a critical step toward being
mentally prepared.
And speaking of the team, one of the biggest shifts in behavior (and
thinking) you’ll encounter will be the need to rely upon others to get things done. In most
cases, that’s your team. You’ll quickly discover that there’s far too much for you to do
alone, yet delegation will prove to be a challenge for you. Empowering others, and then
trusting them to follow through, may be a bit unsettling. Project teams normally cut across
organizational boundaries and include people from several departments or groups. Project
success will require the cooperation of all of these people. To gain this cooperation is
often a challenge. The project leader must be skilled in obtaining cooperation from other
people over whom he or she does not have direct control.
You’ll find yourself uncomfortable with the idea that others are doing things
for which you will be held responsible. You’ll have lots of responsibility, but you’ll be
missing the authority often perceived as being required to discharge that responsibility.
You’ll have to get things done through the people on your team having any direct control
over them. Your most valued tools will be the ability to persuade and influence, as you
seek to form a group of diverse personalities into a unified team with commonalty of
purpose
Project Management Certificate:
The PMP is the gold standard of project management certification.
Recognized and demanded by organizations worldwide, the PMP validates your
competence to perform in the role of a project manager, leading and directing projects and

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teams. The Project Management Professional (PMP)® is the most important industry-
recognized certification for project managers.
You can find PMPs leading projects in nearly every country and, unlike other
certifications that focus on a particular geography or domain, the PMP® is truly global.
As a PMP, you can work in virtually any industry, with any methodology and in any
location. The PMP also increases your earning potential. The PMP signifies that you
speak and understand the global language of project management and connects you to a
community of professionals, organizations and experts worldwide. Become a PMP and
become a project hero.

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Project Management 20 ©FH
A project:
- is temporary in that it has a defined beginning and end in time, and
therefore defined scope and resources.
- a project is unique in that it is not a routine operation, but a specific set
of operations designed to accomplish a singular goal. So a project team
often includes people who don’t usually work together – sometimes
from different organizations and across multiple geographies.
ex. The development of software for an improved business process, the
construction of a building or bridge, the relief effort after a natural disaster,
the expansion of sales into a new geographic market — all are projects.
- And all must be expertly managed to deliver the on-time, on-budget
results, learning and integration that organizations need.
Project management, then, is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and
techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.
- It has always been practiced informally, but began to emerge as a
distinct profession in the mid-20th century. PMI’s A Guide to the
Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) identifies
its recurring elements:
Project management processes fall into five groups:
- Project Initiating
- Planning
- Executing
- Monitoring and Controlling
- Closing
Management knowledge draws on ten areas:
- Integration
- Scope
- Time
- Cost
- Quality
- Procurement
- Human resources
- Communications
- Risk management
- Stakeholder management

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