Your personal learning outcomes from this course. From this week topic project management history I understood that projects in early decades remained as a failure as there is no systematic way of...

Your personal learning outcomes from this course.


From this week topic project management history I understood that projects in early decades remained as a failure as there is no systematic way of managing projects. There are many other reasons for this failure but the most important are underestimating the complexity of project and abilities of human resources. I also found that projects were failed because of variety of obstacles like lack of proper planning, proper cost controlling and lack of proper scheduling, lack of proper project objectives. These were solved by having a clear understanding of the project by careful analysis of the project. After careful analysis of the project some problems like lack of commitment, motivation, functional abilities of employees, ambiguity in policies and all other factors hindered the project success. I also understood that to improve the project success and to improve the instances of project success project managers started using gate reviews for making decisions on projects. Organisations started using some structured processes for managing the project activities and those structured processes are called project management methodologies. I also understood that these methodologies will have a set of principles, procedures, themes, tools and activities that could be applied on any project. It is also important to tailor this methodology to the project activities so that the outcomes add some business value.  I also understood that most of the organisations fail in selecting the proper methodology for a project. There is no single methodology that suits for every project so we need to choose the methodology based on the requirements of the project. I also understood that it is sometimes very difficult to have an enterprise wide methodology as organisations may have different domains that deal with different types of projects. So in order to maintain consistency in the organisation with multiple methodologies guidelines to tie up different methodologies, a common project management frame work would be helpful. I also understood that project management maturity could be achieved in 5 levels of which the first level with involving no documentation, second level with some documentation and usage of some standard processes, in third level most the processes would be documented and integrated in to business processes, fourth level involving all well-defined processes and in the fifth level continuous improvement of the defined processes will be taken care off. The level of maturity we want to achieve in project management depends up on the results of the gap analysis between the current maturity level and desired future maturity level.