Basic Knowledge of Project Management

Before we go deep into the world of project management, it’s important to go over a couple of basic concepts.

What is a Project?

Basically anything that needs to get done over a period of time involving a group of tasks, people, money and needs. There are small, medium and large projects. Some are even tiny and others are huge depending on how complex they are, what do you need to deliver and how many people are involved or how many people are benefited from the project.

An example of a project would be upgrading a system, developing an application and so on. Pretty much you can think of anything which involves time, money and people.

What is a Budget?

A budget in project management is the amount you need to complete a project. So how much money you are going to spend in total from the beginning of the project until the end. This includes everything like resourcing, licensing, consultancy fees, training, travelling etc.

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All the costs that are part of the project should be in the budget and the budget is basically a baseline estimate or a forecast of expanses or cost. Once you develop your budget, you should keep a copy for your records especially after it has been approved by management and before even you start the project. This is one of your key metrics and you need to be really good at keeping track while you are actually spending.

What is a Schedule?

A schedule is a time frame for you to complete the project.

You can create a schedule using many different tools from a basic excel file or power point to more advanced tools such as Microsoft project and smart sheets. A schedule has generally couple of phases and we think those phases group of tasks, milestones and deliverables. Milestone is basically a major deliverable within the project and is marking the schedule for references, keep dates and tasks.

A common question on schedule is how deeply it needs to be and the answer is to this is as detail as you wanted to be since you will be managing the schedule as a PM. So keep it simple and concise. A lot of companies have schedule templates which they use for their projects. You can also find many templates online.

What is Resourcing?

You might hear a lot about resourcing in the project management and whenever we talk about resourcing in the project management, we are talking about people and costs. It is how much money they are costing a project calculating a resourcing is really easy if you know what you are doing.