Project management is a discipline which includes five major components of action that help business teams in achieving specific set goals.
The five actions associated within project management can be separated into the following categories: Initiation, Planning, Executing, Controlling and Closing.
There are ten major areas of knowledge which project management teams draw upon to achieve their chosen business success criteria:
Integration, Scope, Time, Quality, Cost, Procurement, Communication, Human Resources (HR), Risk Management, and Stakeholder Management.
From the above, it is apparent that project management is no easy task. To be more specific, it is no easy set of tasks.
Then, why go through so much trouble to incorporate project management within an organization?
Why Project Management is Important
Before understanding upcoming project management trends and how they will affect businesses in 2019, it is essential to understand why project management is important in the first place.
There are many advantages a business can reap from project management principles, software, and apps but to summarize them all, a brief description has been given below:
Project management helps businesses deliver specific outputs by defining tasks and goals and clearing out obstacles to those goals promptly.
To be more specific, the following list outlines the major benefits businesses get through implementing effective project management systems and strategies:
Clearly defined objectives
Understanding time factors (deliverables)
Efficient and effective use of human resources
Higher probabilities of achieving business goals
Many Companies Underutilize Their Project Management Resources
For whatever reason, many companies, specifically those in the earlier stages of their business lifecycle, have not yet taken project management as seriously as other aspects of their organization.
Bigger enterprises continue to invest heavily in project management resources to manage their outcomes better, while early-stage companies ignore such important tools or perform them poorly, at best.
The following statistics uncover how badly companies misuse their project management resources:
The average business project goes 27% over budget.
Most organizations experience a 70% project-goal failure rate.
Roughly 68% of business projects fail to secure and provide a manager or sponsor that gives an overall direction to their projects.