Introduction to Project Managementwww.pm4dev.com
INTRODUCTION
Project management is not a new management fad; it is a professionalpractice that has reached wide acceptance in many industries fromgovernment to technology. Organizations that have adopted projectmanagement as a key competency have benefited from improvedproject outcomes to significant competitive advantage. Unfortunatelythere is very little material on project management written exclusivelyfor the development and humanitarian assistance sector. Most of theinformation available to development organizations focus on thefunding and monitoring and evaluation process; but there is littleinformation about all the management competencies, methodologiesand practices required to manage a project from beginning to end.Development organizations are facing increasing demands to do morewith less, from becoming catalysts of change in the communities theyserve to deliver the project on time, under budget and in the qualitynot only expected but demanded by donors and beneficiaries. To facethese challenges development and humanitarian assistanceorganizations are in urgent need of the tools, practices methodologiesthat a well established project management methodology can provide,one that has been quite successful in other industries. Donors arerequiring better controls and more professional managerialcompetences in the staff responsible for managing projects, it will notbe a surprise that in the near future this competence is not onlyrequired but demanded.It is PM4DEV’s belief in the need for a new project managementmethodology that responds to the current challenges developmentchallenges face today. Gone are the days when a technicalcompetency on a development field was all that was needed to run aproject. Today’s development projects are more complex and requirethe participation of more stakeholders, the coordination betweendifferent specialist from different fields, and the need to innovatedifferent approaches to solve complex problems.Many years of experience managing projects have convinced us of theneed to increase the use of project management practices indevelopment organizations; this document is one small step to help
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A good introduction to PM for international NGOs