The basic principles and objectives of project management

According to the Association for Project Management (APM), “Project management is the application of processes, methods, knowledge, skills and experience to achieve the project objectives”. Essentially, project management is about planning, organising, securing, managing, leading and controlling a project’s resources to achieve set project goals.

Project management principles

APM defines 13 core components of project management:

• Defining the reason why a project is necessary
• Capturing project requirements, specifying quality of the deliverables, estimating resources and timescales
• Preparing a business case to justify the investment
• Securing corporate agreement and funding
• Developing and implementing a management plan for the project
• Leading and motivating the project delivery team
• Managing the risks, issues and changes on the project
• Monitoring progress against plan
• Managing the project budget
• Maintaining communications with stakeholders and the project organisation
• Provider management
• Closing the project in a controlled fashion when appropriate

PRINCE2 outlines a more simple seven principles, which understandably have a lot of crossover with APM’s core components:

• Continued business justification – a project needs to represent a clear return on investment, justifying the use of time and resources
• Learn from experience – use knowledge gained from earlier projects to avoid repeating mistakes
• Define roles and responsibilities – everyone should know what they and others are doing on the project
• Manage by stages – break difficult tasks into manageable chunks
• Manage by exception – avoid excessive management by only calling on the project board if there is or might be a problem
• Focus on products – use product requirements to define work activity