What is project management?

To provide the description of project management, it is important to begin with the definitions of words: “project” and “management”. So what’s a project? It’s an enterprise, either individual or collaborative, planned in detail and taken in order to achieve a certain goal. Of course, it can refer to anything, beginning from class assignments, to elaborate projects carried on in business corporations. A project is a temporary process which can take only a few days or it can last couple or even many years.

And what about management? It’s as simple as it seems – a practice of being in charge of things or people. So what’s up with Project Management? Project Management as we know it came into existence in the 20th century and in the 1950s became a distinct discipline being used in the tertiary sector of the economy and in generally understood business area. Today it mostly brings together people from varied regions – cities or even countries, each of them having a different field of expertise and cultural background. For this reason, it’s often performed remotely.

There are five stages of project management (according to PMI’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge):

1. Initiation
2. Planning and design
3. Construction
4. Monitoring and controlling
5. Closing

Of course in every project management you have to organize your work to the fullest. You can do it efficiently with a special software called project management software, for example, Trello, Evernote, Asana.