Making a Party out of Project Management: Prologue

Why Start with Waterfall?

The practice of project management has undergone major evolution over the past generation. A major benefit of this evolution is the development of new project management practices, which build on and offer new capabilities to complement the traditional waterfall project management framework. As helpful as these newer methods can be, they can be better understood and better appreciated by starting from the beginning and learning about waterfall project management first.

Waterfall project management, also known as traditional project management, is the approach of starting a project (this is called initiating the project), planning it, doing the work (called executing), making adjustments as needed during the work (called monitoring and controlling), and finally delivering the end result and closing the project. Even with newer methods such as Agile and DevOps, some projects are still best completed using the waterfall approach. But in addition to that, learning about waterfall first allows one to appreciate not only its benefits but also its limitations, and in doing so, better understand why other methods were developed and better appreciate their respective strengths.

This story provides a very simple, relatable example of what a waterfall project might look like. As the classic approach to getting a project done, waterfall is the best starting point for a person to begin learning about project management in general. Read this story carefully to understand the flow of a waterfall project and how the ultimate deliverable is brought to fruition.

Once you read this book and understand how waterfall projects deliver value, you can learn the basics of other frameworks and contrast those with waterfall. You can consider what types of projects are done using waterfall. Some examples would include throwing a party or building a house. What types of projects are better done using Agile or another more flexible approach? One example often cited is software development, where the desired final product changes frequently even after the project is underway, and there is more flexibility about when various parts of the deliverable are made.

Regardless of what project management approach is used for a project, project management in general is all about completing defined one-time efforts that produce a desired result. With this story and continued learning, you will be more and more easily able to determine the best approach for completing any given project. Reading this story is a great first step to discover project management deeply enough to know whether you would like to pursue it as a serious endeavor.

As a final note, please remember that this story is a very simplified example of a project. While the templates and concepts included are a good starting point, expect that a real-world project will require significantly more detail. Keep learning more about project management both independently and from others if you decide that this profession is for you!

Next post in the series: Making a Party out of Project Management: Introduction

Making a Party out of Project Management

The next several posts tell a project management story of a young girl and her quest to throw the best 10th birthday party her little brother could imagine! Read this story to learn project management fundamentals and how to take the first concrete steps toward a career in project management. By explaining project management concepts in the context of throwing a party, examples from the story are commonly relatable and easy to understand.

How can this story help you?

If you want to…

-        Get a good introduction to project management as a very beginner

-        Work on a project at a company that interests you

-        Run your own business

-        Lead others to reach a goal in a group project at school

-        Be an event coordinator

-        Be an architect

-        Build something cool in your garage

-        Plan and successfully complete a complex project at home

-        Practice of the art of “how to” at the next level

…then this book will help you to reach these goals! And if you just want to use it to plan your next party, that’s cool, too.

Next post in the series: Making a Party out of Project Management: Prologue

Why Learn About Project Management

Increase your income and enhance your career prospects by learning about project management! The next series of posts will be a story to introduce basic project management concepts to anyone not already familiar with project management. By reading the next several posts, anyone curious about project management will be able to make an informed decision about whether it might be a fit for them. This story format offers an efficient and interesting way of learning about project management that is straightforward to understand. Read these posts to learn key concepts and concrete action steps for getting started in a project management career!

Three basic reasons why it pays to learn about project management:

-            Project management is a well-paying, prestigious, and in-demand profession

-            Project management skills are transferable to jobs in other career fields

-            Project management knowledge is helpful for increasing general life success

A well-paying, prestigious, and in-demand profession

The average project manager’s salary is well above that of average wage earners in the U.S. (exact numbers vary somewhat by source). If you already have a Bachelor’s degree, even if it’s not in a technical field, you can still work your way into project management by starting out as a project coordinator and earning the Project Management Professional certification after you’ve gained enough experience. Being well-organized, having a desire to learn, and the ability to build good relationships with others are key attributes you can cultivate today to help you succeed in this line of work, thereby increasing your income and advancing your career.

Project management is a career that others will regard highly when you tell them about what you do for work. The more you can tell them about what it’s like to work in project management, the more others will see you as someone who knows what it takes to actually reach a goal with a team. This is great not just to increase other people’s esteem of your professional abilities, but it also helps for making professional networking connections that could help you in the future. Some of those people may want to learn more about project management from you again later.

Project management is a growing field, and all sorts of organizations are becoming more dependent on effective project management for their overall success. As companies further digitize and seek to harness emerging technologies to maximize their profitability and competitiveness, they have a constantly growing need for those who can skillfully lead a project team to make new technical capabilities a reality.

Skills transferable to other jobs

Learning about project management is still worthwhile now even if you aren’t currently a project manager. Every job requires getting something done effectively, and doing so requires time from yourself and often also other people, material resources, and thoughtful planning of how to best use the time and other resources. This is what project management is all about. If you’re attempting to accomplish something that hasn’t quite been done before in your organization, you are doing a project and project management knowledge and skills will help you perform your work better.

As part of your job, do you have to get something done on a timeline? Maybe there’s a budget you have to work with, or a team you have to manage to complete the work? There could be a quality requirement for your work that defines when the job has been done “well enough”, or a risk of encountering an unexpected problem while doing the work. These are all aspects of project management, so if these things apply to your job, then your job has an element of project management to it!

Helpful for increasing general life success

As you’ll see in the story told over the next several posts, project management skills can be effectively applied to achieve more success in your personal life. We all have personal dreams, and if we want to realize those dreams, we need to make goals, which in turn require action plans, which then depend on what resources we really have at our disposal to work toward those dreams. Basically, effectively pursuing dreams or long-term plans requires the ability to understand what it really costs (in time, money, and effort), who you need help from, and what could potentially go wrong along the way. Add in some milestones at points when it makes sense to check that you’re on the right path to achieve your goals, and you’ve got project management principles helping you better succeed at anything you’re trying to achieve in your life!

Conclusion

Project management skills are among the most practically useful and versatile skills a person can learn. These skills are about getting things done with efficiency through a systematic and realistic consideration of what it takes to really get something done. At work, this means very worthwhile opportunities in the project management profession, as well as better equipping anyone working in just about any other career field. And using project management to better plan and accomplish personal pursuits makes learning about project management worthwhile even if you don’t end up working as a professional project manager.

Next post in the series: Making a Party out of Project Management