Elements Of Project Management

INTRODUCTION

The success achieved on project even nowadays still can be considered to be low. Only a bit more less than 40% of the projects is finished with a success and almost 20% with a failure (Standish Group, 2013). Furthermore, considering the amount of money spent on projects (cf. World Bank, 2005), the advanced methodologies, the abundant literature, and professional courses, the success rate is below the expected. Professionals identified the main reasons for failure and success (cf. Blaskovics, 2014; Fortune–White, 2006; Standish Group, 2013), and revealed that project manager and his/her competencies play a highly important role in achieving project success.

This chapter summarizes the elements of project success, the project management

THE DEFINITION OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT

The aim of project management is to manage projects effectively and efficiently. However, project management differs from other management activities due to the nature of the projects (cf. Görög, 2013). Since projects:

• are unique and onetime set of tasks, thus there is a need to manage their temporary being,

• have a definite and predefined aim, thus the main task is the implement this specific project result,

• projects have a definite budget and timeline, thus keeping them can bear of great importance.

In this way, project management is ‘such a management activity, which is emerged from other management areas, and different from operation management routine-like being, is aimed to implement the unique, complex set of activities defined by strategic management’ (Görög, 2003:363).

THE TASKS OF THE PROJECT

Judgev–Müller, 2005). In this way, the early approaches were focusing on the project triangle. But later, after the fall of the long-term strategic planning in the 70s, the client and other stakeholder-related elements became more and more important. Nowadays project success has a strategic orientation due to the ever-changing and complex world (cf. Mészáros, 2010). Thus today project success is a complex phenomenon and has a strategic focus.

But it is worth to distinguish the two elements of project success; (critical) success factors and success criteria (Blaskovics, 2014). The latter are those base values based on which the scale of project success can de decided (Görög, 2013). The first are those factors which increase the potential to project success (cf. Boynton–Zmud, 1984).

SUCCESS CRITERIA

Due to the immanent characteristics of project success, models containing success criteria should satisfy two requirements (cf. Fortune–White, 2006; Judgev–Müller, 2005):

• holism,

• realism.

The first one means that, evaluation models should contain every criterion that is needed to analyse projects properly. The second means evaluation models should not distort the evaluation, i.e. they need to rate successful projects successful, and unsuccessful project