Review of the week

Congratulations on completing the second week of this short course. Watch the video where Umair summarises what we have covered.

Over the past two weeks, we have explored the ‘initiation’ stage of project management in the project life cycle model. The key focus this week was the concept of the ‘triple constraints’ known as the iron triangle. We have talked about why the elements of the triangle are important to project managers and you have critiqued this model as well.

Back to the big question

At the beginning of this course, we discussed the big question:

Why is project management becoming such a powerful and popular practice in business?

During the past two weeks, we have discovered that project management is no longer about managing activities in sequence; it is a systematic approach that is developed to deliver goods on time within budget, and meeting the customer expectations. A good project management approach helps us to eliminate all wastage and maximise the utilisation of resources in a more productive and efficient way. Moreover, it plays an important role to sustain business growth.

Your task

Hopefully you can now identify a number of skills and areas of knowledge that project managers require to manage projects successfully. Take some time to think about and write down:

• What you have learned in the past two weeks
• Areas you would like to develop
• How you will go about achieving this

To help you find the answers, we’ve attached a list of the readings we have presented throughout this short course (in the order that they appeared) in the ‘downloads’ section below.