Behavioural Aspect of Project Management

Essay by cmdoUniversity, Master'sA+, July 2006

download word file, 10 pages 3.7

Abstract

"Project management is the discipline of defining and achieving targets while optimizing (or just allocating) the use of resources over the course of a project" (Wikpedia). This paper will discuss the important role that the project manager plays in successful completion of a project and impact of organizational culture.

Introduction

Project management is a very complicated process that is crucial to the success of any project in an organization. Project management involves a great deal of work and savvy by the manager. He or she must not only deal with meeting time tables, meeting budgets, perform within certain quality standards, but also have to deal with all the different personalities of coworkers. The manager must be able to affiliate all the different personalities into one cohesive group which will work together to meet the corporate mission and proper completion of the project. It is even more problematic because the same people do not usually work together on all the projects.

When the manager is not able to make the group work in a cohesive fashion, the project usually starts going in disarray, with problems in meeting schedules, budgets and quality. The employees will usually also be disgruntled and unhappy. A manager will have to change the management style in order to counteract these problems. They will need to evaluate the cause of the delays, the cause of why the project is over budget and make the appropriate changes to change directions. It might be that the initial budget on time tables might be unreachable. As to morale the manager might need to give incentive in order to increase morale and get the project on tack.

How Organization Culture Influences the Selection

Gray describes organizational culture as, "a system of shared norms, beliefs, values, and assumptions which binds people...