Project management concepts

A project is a one-off venture that has a set of objectives, or goals, that have to be met within time, cost and quality constraints. A project has a specific start and end, and is separate from on-going routine day-to-day work.

Project management is a disciplined approach to planning and controlling a project so that it is completed on time, within budget and meets the objectives that were specified at its outset. You plan a project before it starts, then control it once it is underway.

Programme management uses the same approach as project management, but involves simultaneously planning, controlling and monitoring a number of related projects, sometimes known as a portfolio of projects. Each project might have a Project Manager reporting to the Programme Manager, who is in charge of the whole portfolio.

Programme management can involve sharing resources across multiple simultaneous projects. In Asta Powerproject, you can share resources across related projects and you can set up access rights individually for each user to restrict the edits that they can perform. For example, the Programme Manager may have access rights enabling them to edit all projects, but Project Managers may have access rights enabling them to edit only their own projects.

Resource management involves planning and monitoring all resources used in a project, or a group of projects. Resources are the people, equipment, machinery and materials needed to carry out tasks in a project. Asta Powerproject makes a distinction between permanent resources, for example people and equipment, and consumable resources, for example materials.

Knowing what skills are required is a process of resource management. In some projects, the initial resource planning is performed by the Project Manager, then the detail is added by the Resource Manager. The Project Manager is only concerned with the skills required to complete a task, whereas the Resource Manager knows which people are available with the necessary skills and whom to assign to each task.

Asta Powerproject enables you to specify the skills required to complete a task, then add individual resources to the task at a later stage. This is known as demand and scheduled resourcing.

When sharing resources across multiple projects, you need to know which resources will be needed most and organise them efficiently before assigning them to tasks. Once resources have been assigned to tasks, it is important to know if any are over-allocated, ie have been assigned more work than they can satisfy. In Asta Powerproject, you can graph resource usage in histograms to see if there are any extreme fluctuations, or if resource usage is constant. You can level permanent resources automatically to keep their usage constant, and manually adjust the allocation of consumable resources to avoid periods of fluctuating usage.

Project management software is a tool that can help you to plan your project, dictate a sequence of events, keep track of progress, analyse aspects such as resource and cost usage, experiment with what if scenarios and generate project reports. Asta Powerproject is such a tool.

The benefits of using project management software include:

• You do not have to redraw your plans by hand every time you make a change.
• You can easily experiment with alternative scenarios and see the effect that one change to a plan has on the whole project.
• You can produce focused reports that are tailored precisely to your needs.
• The software performs all the intensive recalculations and reporting for you, allowing you to spend your time overseeing the project instead of recalculating and analysing the schedule manually.
• You can save your plans at regular intervals, keeping a permanent record of a project's progress at every stage.