Project management for professionals

Project management for professionals is characterized by the fact that usually one project undertaken within a company can be assumed on a cross-departmental and cross-functional basis, so that different professionals are engaged into performing the same project, but they deal with it only through their own vision, area, and specificity, doing their specific portions of working efforts. In this article we will consider how an approach to PM for business professionals can vary and differentiate from one professional team to another one:

• HR professionals – these guys usually are responsible for project staffing: recruiting good specialists, contracting them, ensuring their social welfare, etc. Besides this, they take care of accounting and remunerating employees’ working hours, days and workloads. It necessary for them to control project roles, project’s demand for specialists, availability and skills of company’s professionals.
• technical professionals – technical specialists and experts are those who are responsible for the “real side” of the project – they undertake actual technical design, production, and implementing of the project’s products and results, so that these items are created according to certain pre-defined requirements and determined specifications. It is necessary for such specialists to invent and realize technical solutions satisfying both project’s customers and managers.
• transit professionals – they are responsible for physical transportation of project’s items such as materials, resources, equipment and products. Their side is deliverance of required objects to the right places and at right time, so that all transportation obligations and schedules are properly met.

• IT professionals – these technical specialists are responsible for electronic, computational and informative facilities of the projects (computers, communicational networks, different kinds of hardware and software, such as software-programmable equipment, etc). Their portion is about maintaining project’s IT-systems to make sure that they are workable, productive and support activities of other team members well.
• administrative professionals – efforts of these guys are focused on collecting and systematizing administrative information to know, analyze, monitor and evaluate performance achievements, work quality, and actual statuses of different project’s components whether these are wide business processes, specific activities, or individual workers. Their part embraces controlling and reporting indicators of supervised objects: time parameters, costs, expenses, factual issues, KPI, etc.

• design professionals – these people are supposed to be not only highly-educated and highly-skilled experts in their spheres of design, but also they need to possess personal creativity traits as usually design-related practice requires non-trivial engineering decisions and solutions which sometimes can help in saving a big amount of project resources which where prepared for investment.
• contracting professionals – these professionals are people who undertake contracts management efforts – they track statuses of contracts in order to know how well contracted obligations are performed – if all these terms are well-observed, if contract scope isn’t exceeded, if these contracts need renewal. Their efforts on PM support organization’s relations with contractors that support different functions of project performance – project-related transportations, providing and storing raw materials, providing necessary equipment, technologies, human resources, etc.

Specific example of software supporting project management for professionals:

VIP Task Manager is a client-server program that can help different levels and departments of project to collaborate and share their efforts in terms of creating synergy of different efforts. This program is easy to use and administrate, it is quick to master, and flexible enough to adjust up to your company’s specifics (as well as to specificity of all professional divisions existing in your organization), and also it can work equally well both through your LAN and via the Internet. This tool is a great solution for organizing cross-departmental co-operation in terms of tasks, objectives and timelines, costs and priorities, etc.