Project management fundamentals

Every project method, predictive or agile, rests on a small set of questions. Why are we doing this, and who pays? What exactly will exist at the end, and what will not? In what order must the work happen, and which pieces wait on others? What could go wrong, and who is watching for it? Who needs to agree, and who can stop us? The predictive tradition answers these in documents written early and changed under control; agile methods answer them in short cycles and revise them often. The questions themselves never change, which is why this vocabulary comes first.

The core artefacts, in the order they appear

1. A project charter authorises the work and names the sponsor, the purpose and the boundaries. Without one, the project manager is spending money nobody has formally committed.
2. A statement of project scope fixes what will be delivered and, just as importantly, what will not.
3. A work breakdown structure splits that scope into deliverables and then into packages a person can estimate and own.
4. A schedule orders the packages by dependency. The critical path through it sets the earliest finish, and a Gantt chart is the usual way to show it to others.
5. A risk register records what might happen, how likely and how damaging it is, and who owns the response.
6. A stakeholder map shows who is affected and who has power over the outcome, the starting point of stakeholder management.
7. Change control governs how any of the above may be altered once agreed, and earned value management is the formal way to measure progress against that baseline.

How the standards frame it

PMI's PMBOK Guide stopped prescribing a process sequence with its seventh edition and described instead the areas where project performance is won or lost: stakeholders, team, approach and life cycle, planning, the work itself, delivery, measurement and uncertainty. The eighth edition regroups these into seven. PRINCE2 takes the opposite line and supplies a defined set of principles, themes and processes that an organisation tailors to each project's size. IPMA's scheme assesses competence rather than knowledge of one method. At entry level, PRINCE2 Foundation, CAPM and IPMA Level D all admit candidates without project experience, and Google's certificate teaches the same ground with no exam at the end. The PMP sits above them, and its Process domain is where these artefacts are examined in realistic situations.

From here the field branches. Teams working on uncertain products usually move towards agile and Scrum. People drawn to the human side go on to leadership and organisational change. Those who care most about what should be built at all move towards business analysis or product management, where the question shifts from delivering the scope to choosing it.