Project Management
Project management is the art of planning and executing a company's projects, and organizing and supervising the people who work for them. The goal of project management is to finish projects in a timely manner and within a defined budget, following the guidelines outlined by the organization.
A project manager supervises the team of employees working on a specific project, and ensures that each person is doing his or her job efficiently and effectively. The projects being managed can range from weeklong initiatives to undertakings of several years, with budgets ranging from a few thousand dollars to several million. Project managers may manage a small staff of workers or a very large team, and are always responsible for seeing a project right through from inception to completion.
Examples of projects where management is required would be creating and launching a new website, producing vacation packages for a hotel, constructing a new multi-use research facility for a university, inventing a new software system for a telecommunications company, and inventing and executing an advertising campaign for a new retail clothing company.
Generally speaking, there are five main components to a project management position, all of which work to increase a company's profitability and productivity:
- Leadership: motivating and supervising employees to work together to reach common goals.
- Strategy: developing short-term and long-term objectives that will accomplish a company's aims.
- Decision-Making: making important decisions that take into consideration risk and conflicting interests.
- Innovation: using creativity and innovative thinking to create, analyze, and evaluate new concepts and opportunities.
- Execution: carrying out strategies and plans through effective resource management.
Coursework for this degree covers project-related technology, business concepts, and business applications. If you are pursuing a degree in project management, you can expect to take classes such as the following:
- Leadership and Organizational Behavior
- Managerial Statistics
- Human Factors and Team Dynamics
- Accounting and Finance
- Project Risk Management
- Quality Management
- Project Planning
- Leading Effective Teams
- Project Management Systems
- Converting Strategy into Action
- Project Cost and Schedule Control
Careers: People with this degree often pursue careers in financial services, marketing, information technologies, business administration, government, international trade, and construction.
Skills: Individuals who are successful project managers tend to be extremely organized, detail-oriented, hardworking, and focused. They also need to be creative, communicative, and good at leading teams of people. Assertiveness and being comfortable working with different sorts of people are useful attributes for those working in this field.
Salary: Project management is a relatively new degree field, but as more and more businesses adopt a project-based approach, it is becoming increasingly popular. Salaries for project managers vary depending on the types of projects they supervise. A construction manager, for instance, is paid an average of $79,860 per year. Computer and information systems managers had a median salary of $112,210 in 2008, whereas industrial production project managers had a median salary of $83,290. As more companies turn to this project-based method of work, more project managers will be needed to oversee new assignments in many fields of business.
Article Resources:
DeVry University
Murdoch University
Stanford University
University of California, Berkeley
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: "Computer and Information Systems Managers"
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: "Construction Managers"
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: "Industrial Production Managers"
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: "Project Managers Stay in Charge and Out Front"