Download Free The Ultimate Guide to Project Management PDF
Learn everything you need to successfully manage projects and get them done.
Who Is This Guide For?
Projects come in all shapes and sizes. Your team’s next big invention? That’s a project. Remodeling your kitchen? Ditto.
This book starts out with the basics of project management—it gets you up to speed on what lean, Gantt, scrum, and other project management terms are all about. It’s perfect for the first-time project manager or anyone who feels overwhelmed by projects.
Then, there are app roundups of the best project management tools, along with the app stacks teams use to handle everything else in their projects. Those come alongside expert advice on running projects, choosing software, and using project management apps for personal tasks. They’re perfect for anyone managing projects— whether you’re looking for better tools and tricks to keep projects on schedule, or are just starting out.
An Intro to Project Management
It’s a boring topic, project management, one filled with more cryptic vocabulary and acronyms than most. Wouldn’t it be better to just do the work, instead of spending time coming up with new ways to micro-manage it? Yet project management is essential, the stuff of champions.
And it’s something you already do, even if you’re more likely to just jump in and do the work instead of writing down a plan first. Perhaps simple tasks can just get done. But even for a blog post like this to be published, a process must be followed. One must at minimum write the text, add it to the blog CMS, and hit Publish.
That post is suddenly a small project, with its own project management system. Projects, you see, are just “proposed or planned undertakings.” Project management systems, then, are ways to plan that undertaking. Do we start everything at once, or split tasks over time? What needs doing before the next task can be started? Those questions and more are answered by your project management system.
Project management apps? They’re just digital personification of those project management systems, a way to plan due dates and structure projects in some system. They’re not all that different paper wall calendars you’d plot projects on in years gone by. The only difference is, as software, they can be “smart”—they can remind you of upcoming due dates, automatically reschedule future tasks when something’s delayed, and make sure everyone on your team can see that calendar, no matter where they are in the world.
So, you’ve got it. You have an idea you want to pursue—that’s your project. You decide the order in which to do the tasks, and who’s responsible for what—that’s your project management system. And you list all those tasks and due dates in a program—that’s your project management app.
But it’s not quite that simple. You’ll likely need a bit more structure to your project, ways to manage your task workflows and deadlines and make sure everything’s done consistently well. That’s where the most popular project management systems come in. They’re built on decades of research from corporations and governments and have been proven to work. And if they’re not perfect for you, you could always tweak them into your own customized project management system.
