INF338: Leadership & Comm Skills for Project Management

Final Paper – Group Project Management
Kimberly V. Adams
INF338: Leadership & Comm Skills for Project Management
Instructor Paul Richardson
September 5, 2016
Introduction
Project Management is considered as a highly valued skill in today’s corporate life. This job strongly requires the ability to oversee and administer the contingent end-to-end processes of a pre-determined project. Thus, this role strongly requires “careful and thoughtful planning and monitoring throughout the project.” Consequently, since a project manager administers a group who works on the project, a project manager has to make sure that a smooth and fluent working dynamics exist in between group members. In simpler terms, a project manager acts as an overseer that monitors and administers working relations between members to ensure that the goals of the project are achieved. In terms of theory, Project management is usually loosely replaced (or perhaps mistaken for) by other terminologies such as Project Management Methodology and Project Management Approach. Even though these concepts are somehow similar to the general term – Project Management – these specify in greater detail the aspects, methodology, and the objective of the trade. In line with this, I believe that it is essential that we give a definition on each of these meanings before we proceed with the particulars of our construction project before we can construct a project strategy that would maximize the output of our project plan.
Project Methodology and Project Approach
According to Špundak (2014), “Project Management methodology is usually defined as a set of methods, techniques, procedures, rules, templates, and best practices used on a project”. This means that these are the guidelines that are widely known in the field of project management and that are being followed by most project managers. In Špundak’s article, he gave an insight into the wide scope of definitions about Project methodology. One of the definitions that he cited is from Gane (2001), who defines project management as; “methodology from the knowledge perspective as knowledge set about tasks, techniques, deliveries, roles and tools used during the course of the project paired with knowledge about adjusting all of that to specific project”; and Cockburn (2003), who defined the term as; “any principle project management team relies on in order to successfully deliver project result”. Based from all of these authors that he cited, it is apparent that Project methodology basically defines the tools and practices that a project manager employs to reach his goals. However, in this paper, much emphasis is given on the types of Project Management Approach and its application.
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As compared to Project Management Methodology, Project Management approach is the template that categorizes whether the project manager deals with the planning, conflict, and closure of the project in a (1) traditional or a more (2) flexible approach – which also gi...