The Research On Micro-Expressions And It's Definition

Backgrounds

Project Management is such a vast topic that it can only be discussed very briefly in this paper. Every since human civilization has started, we are using all kinds of approaches trying to solve different problems. Then we have them encased in a project so that we can tackle them individually.

The concept of the project management is formally taking shape in the 1950s (Wikipedia, 2018) when an organization is started to adopt project management tools on complex engineering projects. At that time, systematic concepts start to merge. There was one person worth to mention here is named Henry Gantt, the same person who has named the famous Gantt chart. He was the founding fathers of the planning and control techniques, laid the ground for the modern-day project management.

What is the Project Management?

With the brief history mentioned above, we will have a short introduction on the concept itself about exactly what is the project management?

When talking about the project management, what comes to the mind of the most of the people would be some big construction projects, rocket launches, sophisticated machinery or some science research projects. Yes, they definitely are projects that will apply the project management approaches, but they are just very high level and typical projects. The truth is, the actual project management concept can be applied to almost anything in our day to day lives. Even tine small things like trying to read a new book. By choosing the right model for each specified scenario, we can increase our possibilities of success in anything we do.

In nowadays environment, virtually every job requires a certain level of planning, understanding and who or what is involved, how much time it’s going to take, what’s the cost, what’s the possible results, and so on. To be able to take on the challenges work and life presents to us, we need a systematical tool of the project management to help us to achieve that goal.

Basics on the Project Management

Here we start with the definition of the Project Management. According to the Association for Project Management in the UK, the Project Management and Projects are:

“Project management is the application of processes, methods, knowledge, skills and experience to achieve the project objectives. “(APM, 2018)

One core concept is that the Project Management is a process, so, it will have definite starting and ending point to restrain the length of the project. This is normally what we referred to as the project life cycle. In this limited time span, a project should be able to achieve pre-designed objectives. To make sure the organization or the person who runs the project to have a better chance to end up with a successful result, here is when the project management will be employed for that purpose.

The APM has a very simplified structure to illustrate for a typical project, what should be included in. There are three elements they have pointed out as the Time, Cost and Quality.

Time and the cost are finite, by defining these two, a project's lifecycle is defined. The Quality is the result that will come out of a project. This will help to make sure all of the cost and time invested in the project can have an acceptable outcome. With an expectation like this, the time and the cost can be adjusted along the way while the way of the entire project life cycle to maximize the possibility of having a better outcome.

With each year come and go, the content of what the project management should include in are changing as well, but normally, they should have the elements as follows:

1. Defining the reason why a project is necessary;
2. Capturing project requirements, specifying the quality of the deliverables, estimating resources and timescales;
3. Preparing a business case to justify the investment;
4. Securing corporate agreement and funding;
5. Developing and implementing a management plan for the project;
6. Leading and motivating the project delivery team;
7. Managing the risks, issues, and changes on the project;
8. Monitoring progress against plan;
9. Managing the project budget;
10. Maintaining communications with stakeholders and the project organization;
11. Provider management;
12. Closing the project in a controlled fashion when appropriate. (APM, 2018)

Here are little discussions on some of the components.

• Finding a solid reason why the project is important and worth the investment of money and time is obviously very critical for any project to become viable. While the following process, certain detail needs to defined to support that reason the found earlier. These 2 components generally happened while a process called the viability assessment. This is a stage where the project is not even there yet, but a lot of work should already take place to make sure the foundation of the whole project is solid.
• Finding the right people for the job is also important for the project can achieve what it set out to be. Building the team of the project, not just for the management, and try to make them can work, as a functional organization is the job of the project management team. For the most of the time, this is not an easy solve by using some theoretical model, especially the team is assembled from different companies and representing their own specialties and interests. This is more of a process where people get to know each other rather than just trying to build a hierarchy and told others to finish what they get to assigned with. Of course, the detail of this process can be infinite and millions of factors can affect if this is the best solution for the project. For example, in different social environment settings, this will be utterly different from one to another.
• Once the project gets approved and start to get ongoing, the process will become more dynamic and more constant observation and management is required to shaper this ‘dynamic' stays in a controllable range. This stage, it will include periodical assessments and review meetings to have all of the risk and uprising issues take cared along the way. In the same process, the resources reallocation like the fund, time or team adjustment also happens. The reason that this part is important is that at the starting point, the viability assessment team are limited by their resources and their personal experience level. And, most importantly, we are all humans, we make mistakes, it’s just a fact that we all have to accept. Within a dynamic environment setting and the acknowledge of our limitations, it is a natural resort that we need monitoring the entire life cycle of the project and making incremental adjustments to make the project pushing towards the desired direction.
• When the project is coming to an end, the exact time can be varied. It could be a date pre-designed on the plan from the beginning if everything is going as expected and all of the risks are under proper control. In reality, this is very rare to happen due to the reason we discussed before in the last paragraph – the limitations the project team is facing. As the common direction of combining effort of a project team is to have the project completed with quality, the final closing day gets updated along the way in the entire life cycle of the project on the countless meeting between all parties.

Depending on the different type of the project, a slightly different approach gets adopted to suit different settings:

For a multidisciplinary team composed of many different companies, when the project is closed, normally it is closed in every way.

For a single company or just project only inside one company, and if the management team is a very good one, they will leave few days before the project starts to do a full and detailed review on the performance of the project team. This not about to find who to blame for the faults and errors, but to pay attention to what can be learned from it and how to make it better next time. Any company adopts this process in the post-project stage will be benefited for the long run. A sad fact is, most organization around the world can see this or at least can’t act on it even if they see this. They just to have their project team assigned with a new project to maximize their profit.

Why do we use it?

It is a well-known fact that the problems we are facing are becoming even more complex than before. The simple and direct solution applies to a previously single problem is no longer adequate for us. A systematic way has to develop or adapt for any individuals or companies if they are looking for a proper solution for an issue. The Project Management is an answer just for that.

With this powerful tool, we can get an acceptable result for all parties at least within the given limited resources like time and fund more easily. It wouldn’t guarantee a success, but it will significantly increase the probability of achieving the goal.