The Philosophy of Project Management

Abstract

Project management continues to grow and improve as an area of professionalism. We are now seeing a resurgence of methodologies applied to the management of projects. This applies to a range of professions, such as construction, engineering and informatics. As technology changes we see a continuing growth in the need for professional project managers in such areas as managing application systems development, software development, multidimensional databases, logical and physical design of local and wide area networks, multimedia, office automation, systems, generic office and common operating environments, integration and re-engineering the workflow of an office. This latter type of project is similar to paperwork simplification, which was popular before the proliferation of computers but is now a requisite for document image-processing systems and workflow analysis. The paradigm is that, whereas in the past project teams were captive audiences, this is no longer the case. Project managers must now manage in a variety of ways.