Project management: what is it, goals, and benefits

When a team wants to reach their goals on time, elements such as planning and organization are essential to make things work. Maintaining good communication among team members and being able to find the solution to any possible blockers is also vital for success.

That’s why project management is crucial to boost the performance of teams, regardless of segment.

What is a project?

Before digging deeper into project management, let’s first establish what a project is. According to Project Management Body of Knowledge’s (PMBOK) 6th edition, "a project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result". Projects can be done at all organizational levels and can involve one or more people.

A project can be the creation of something new or the process of improving something that already exists. These are a few examples:

Building an app
Installing a new software version for a company
Implementing a new feature for a digital product

Projects have life cycles, and these cycles are the phases they may go through from the beginning until the end. These phases depend on several elements, like the company’s segment, the project's scope, or management's needs, for instance.

Even though projects are temporary, not all of them can be delivered in a short period. Projects end when the team achieves its goals, there aren't enough available resources to allocate, there's no longer a need to reach the determined goals, or legal constraints arise.

What is project management?

According to the Project Management Institute, “project management is the use of specific knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to deliver something valuable for people.” It can be useful for software development, constructing buildings, or any other kind of project.

What are the goals of project management?

Regardless of the initiative or method, project management uses tools, techniques, and knowledge to plan and monitor project elements such as the roadmap, possible risks, quality, resources, and stakeholders involved.

With project management, it's possible to have a clear picture of when each phase must be delivered, what resources (human or financial) will be required to carry out each of the stages, what the possible risks are, and what can be done to minimize them.

This process coordination can also raise the bar for deliveries in each phase, and it helps keep stakeholders in the loop, whether they're directly or indirectly involved in carrying out the project.

By managing these variables, it's possible to identify and overcome unforeseen events, keep the team following the planned schedule, and increase the chances of success in each phase. Project management also helps in optimizing processes, which reduces costs.

The absence of project management can jeopardize the quality of deliveries. Other consequences of not adopting project management are:

Exceeded budgets
Missed deadlines
Unsatisfied stakeholders
Repeated work

What is agile project management?

In companies, teams, or environments with constant changes, it's essential to quickly adapt projects as new needs arise. That’s when agile methodologies can be used for management, to add value and enhance the chances of achieving positive results.

One agile methodology is Scrum, a structure in which the division of work by sprints is one of the main characteristics. Sprints are predefined periods for the team to develop tasks that will be determined by each member, according to the feasibility of carrying them out in the established time.

Within a sprint, the Scrum method includes set phases:

Planning: To establish which tasks should or shouldn't be performed and completed in the sprint, depending on technical feasibility, project needs, or other relevant factors
Demo: To give visibility to the tasks delivered during the sprint
Daily meetings: Quick meetings for team alignment, identifying possible bottlenecks while performing tasks, and ways to work around them
Retrospective: To review the practices that worked (or not) during the sprint, and find ways to improve the team's work

To facilitate the visualization of each person's tasks and progress during the sprint, Scrum also uses boards with columns for each of the steps. "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done" are some examples of columns used on these boards.

Kanban is another agile methodology widely used to manage projects, and it aims to motivate the team to complete tasks as quickly as possible. The number of tasks is defined according to the team's capacity—and whenever a task ends, the idea is that the team can start the next one with no delay.

Within this methodology, there are four components:

Work list: Where the pending tasks are
Columns or rows: Used to differentiate tasks from different users or projects
Work-in-progress limits: Used to limit the amount of work for each team member, depending on their capacity
Rolling versions: Background of projects within the work-in-progress limits

As with Scrum, Kanban uses a board to map out tasks and give visibility to work progress for team members. This template also makes it possible to create reports and schedules.

What is software project management?

Digital tools are increasingly present and have become indispensable in our daily lives. For that reason, it's important to have project management software that can help professionals responsible for project management align team members, identify and solve bottlenecks, measure project performance, and achieve targets in a quick and effective way.

With Qntrl as your project management software, it's possible to visualize the work that needs to be done during sprints, encourage collaboration, analyze metrics, and centralize information to give visibility to all stakeholders involved.

Process automation is also one of Qntrl's features, as it's possible to assign tasks to specific team members if these activities happen with some frequency, based on their role or the project phase.

Check out some of the other benefits of using Qntrl as your project management software: