What is project management?

Project management is the skill of managing and applying resources, tools and processes to produce results within a set of requirements, time and constraints.

What is a project?

A project is a unique and temporary endeavour to produce a product or service. Temporary means every project begin and end. Unique means the result of the project differs in some way from all other products or services.

Wayne Turk has written about the seven deadly sins of project management. He lists them as follows:

Sin #1: Failing to have good, stable requirements – I don’t agree on this. Stable requirements are a rare occurrence as business needs change rapidly. Unless the project you’re managing is about selling rags on streets, expect never ending iterations in business requirements.

How many productive hours do you expect your people to work in a day? Rather, how many required hours do the person has to work? This depends on the labor law of the country but for my insight I will use the standard 8 hours we have from where I come from.

While productive hours and required hours should ideally be the same, there are lots of factors that could hinder the person from rendering a full 8 hours of productivity and these includes restroom breaks, small chats with superiors, brainstorming, phone calls, etc. which hit the total productive hours the person can accomplish for the day without overtimes.