BATHROOM REMODELING

Bathroom Remodeling

Bathroom Remodeling

Introduction

Project management (PM) refers to the management and control of projects and temporary organizations. Generally speaking, managing a project concerns a task to be completed with a limited set of resources—be it personnel, material, or financial resources—and within a certain period.

The abundance of projects in today's industry and business life has given rise to much interest in PM. And some commentators argue that the use of the project form of organization is still on the increase so that there is continually an ongoing projectization in society as a whole. Many activities are defined as projects and organized as time-limited efforts. One implication of this is that a growing number of people are involved in PM and some of them even have the title project manager or consider themselves to be project managers. This proliferation of projects is paralleled by the availability of practical handbooks in the area. So even if project manager is not an officially recognized profession, it has some of the traits of a profession.

At the very heart of PM is the concern for fulfilling the task of the particular project at hand. That task can be described in physical terms—a house to be constructed, to give one example—or in abstract terms—a reorganization of the market activities of a company, as another example—and the task is central for the project. One foremost prerequisite for good PM is that the project task gets completed. And the ability of a project manager to see to it that the project is planned and organized in such a way that the task is fulfilled within the constraints of the resources provided and on time is what distinguishes an efficient and able project manager from an inefficient one. A project manager is also judged on the ability to handle the group team so that the goals can be attained.

One challenge in PM is to isolate the project from its environment—PM theory assumes that this isolation can be done in practice—and to organize it in overall terms. The ability to manage the project in relation to its proper context is sometimes denoted as project governance and involves organizing the relationships between the stakeholders of the project, be it owners or sponsors, the project manager, and the team involved in carrying through the project. Project governance is concerned with overall effectiveness rather than project efficiency (Sahlin, 2008).

Many project actors face a situation where they are taking part in a number of simultaneous projects. Rather than focusing on one project, they have to balance participation in several projects and make priorities in relation to the critical delivery situation in each project. The resources of the organization hosting such a group of projects have to be managed well under such circumstances of project governance importance. Concerns about the project portfolio supersede the concerns about managing an individual project. But handling a set of projects has implications for the individual as well as for the total host ...