Having a good PM in place can save your company a lot of time and money when it comes to your projects. A PM is an individual who helps the project team to deliver on a certain goal. As more and more projects are outsourced to individuals in other countries, having a PM would be a very smart thing to do. PMs can anticipate problems that might arise and they can resolve them quickly. When the PM has done their job on the project, then they can take control of the schedule, resources, risk, and budget management for the project, as a good PRINCE2 Practitioner course training will tell you.
Project management requires that you know what your goals are and you know how much it will cost in terms of time and resources to achieve them. The PM should also be able to provide you with the products or services that you need.
In project management, there are five stakeholders: The team members, the sponsor, the management, the customers, and other stakeholders. Each of these individuals will need to be consulted to determine the approach that will be needed for various aspects of the project. These individuals will also need to be informed about the change in those areas that they are directly concerned and responsible for. However, the more input they have, the more likely that they will find that their influence and involvement are needed for them to gain maximum participation. If you’re the project sponsor then you’ll need to ask the team to come up with their project plans, plans regarding any risks, the risks that might not be fatal but might be costly and most importantly, make the necessary decisions when the issues arise.
It is also an advantage to have a PM who is a member of the core team. You can ask the core team questions and what their suggestions are to increase the probability of having your costs and risks reduced. It is a good idea to not have more than three key people from the project team involved. Being too many people involved will cause failure.
I remember working for a company where we were in charge of the payroll and that didn’t have a project manager and they didn’t do anything. They spent all of their time writing checks and accounting paperwork. This got to the point where we had no idea where we were going and what we wanted to accomplish with the project. They changed direction rapidly and they couldn’t keep up with it. It is a good idea to have a PM who is in charge of the project, who is responsible for the risks and what can keep a project moving forward. This way, if there are problems that come up you can “air them out” of the project. Finding out that you have to spend money that’s unapproved or unexpected is the same as being “on the hook”. However, a PM will be able to work with you to resolve these types of problems early on so you won’t have extra budget waste and man hours wasted dealing with these types of issues.
Directing a project effectively is learning and implementation-dependent. At the early stages of the project and in the beginning stages, it is a good idea to sit down with the team members to have them write out what they expect to accomplish during the project. Then, you can capture that information in a program and use this for all future project management.