The Essence of Project Management

The essence of project management includes:
(1) Aim,
(2) Methods,
(3) Planning and Execution.
(1), Aim, is the most critical element to the success of a project. For example, in order to aim accurately, the leader needs to be able to judge whether an innovative project can be implemented under the circumstances or not, or whether the negative influence of a merger will lead to project failure or not. Since human resources have the greatest impact on knowledge work, aiming accurately also means that the leader needs to have the wisdom to select the right people for the right job, or make the judgment call that it is impossible to find the needed talents under the circumstances.

Methods are often talked about in conferences and I am not going to discuss them in detail here. The only thing I want to point out is that the process that is actually used by people resides in their heads, not on paper. The process experts who pay attention to what looks good on paper, not how to get the team to adequately learn and be motivated to use the process, will develop a paper process that is remains unused and sits on a shelf.

Although project planning and execution does not require as great wisdom as formulating the correct aim, there are still many project failures because of improper planning and execution. Project planning and execution depend on discipline, people skills and knowing how to get the needed information in order to continuously keep things on track. The difficulties in planning and execution include:
a、 The real-life comlilexities are usually greater than what were considered in the plan. There are also time, cost and resource constraints in real-life execution.
b、 In terms of requirement communications and commitments, people often talk ambiguously and sometimes personal subjective factors are involved. As a result, there is often a high degree of vagueness in requirement communications and commitments.
c、 How to ensure a reasonable honesty level of the knowledge workers.

I am going to expatiate upon the following points next. I hope an understanding of these points will help project managers and team members to increase their effectiveness in project planning and execution.

1、 How the controllability of certain information affects human behaviors.
2、 Under what circumstances will information transparency increase or decrease.
3、 The project information transparency level that we can reach today. By saying so I mean that information transparency levels are not currently at good or satisfactory levels.
4、 How to increase the project information transparency with the aid of advanced tools.