Project Management has becoming more and more important as the life cycle of the product become shorter and shorter. If you just take a good look at the mobile phone industry, how many colors do we have on our phone way back 10 - 15 years ago? I believe, it has only one colors and there are not many models around as well. But, let's look at the scenario today, how many models and colors of mobile phone do we have today? I'm not able to count.

So, why does the product life cycle have to do with project management?

When the product life cycle is shorter, companies have to keep introduce new products and when you need to introduce new products, we always need R&D which involves project management and new product introduction (NPI) will involve also project management skills.

Now, if you look at the definition of a project according to Wikipedia, a project is defined in the field of project management, consists of a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a product or service. As the product life cycle becomes shorter and shorter, I believe one day every thing that we produce may be just a temporary endeavor, even services.

Therefore, project management has become a very important skills that all managers and leaders should possess.

In this article, I'm going to discuss the important three Ps of Project Management. They are:

* Project Scoping and Planning * Process * People

Project Scope and Planning:

I can't emphasize more on the importance of project scoping. A lot of project managers just jump into action immediately when they get a new project. Recently, I have seen an experienced project manager that did not really work the details of the project's scope and the consequence is the project failed. If you subscribe to this PMzine in http://Online-Project-Management-Training.com, you should have the project management templates and don't just download and keep them. Go through them one by one and customized them to suit your own situation and environment. Then, work with team to come up with a work process that the team can use to manage your project. This is the next important part - Process, that I am going to discuss in the next part.

Based on your experience and your team experience, work out your project scope as detail as possible. You can use the information learned from past projects or work the details with your sponsors who has experience in a similar type of projects.

Next, work out your project plan. Use the work breakdown structure (WBS), break your project activities as small as possible. Of course, you need to plan all your resources. Most project management will teach you in this aspect so I'm not going to discuss more over here.

Process:

Why process is so important but a lot of project managers actually are ignorant about that. They feel that a project is always something new and there is no standard process of running a project. They are right in the sense of every project can be something new or fresh but the way we manage a project is always almost the same. That is why there is a standard process that we can follow based on the company working culture, and business environment.

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