Whether you are a marketing project management specialist, a project manager, or a creative agency project manager, every project is an organized and structured process. To help you visualize this, let’s use a simple definition provided by projectmanager.com : Project management is the discipline of planning, executing, and completing projects. Each term in this definition could claim a separate topic, but that’s not what we want to emphasize. What you should focus on is the process.
In the above definition, project management is considered a process consisting of three phases. However, this process can be divided into four, five and six phases. Nevertheless, each of them includes hungary telegram phone numbers several more groups of elements, smaller processes, tasks and - of course - challenges. The process has its own term. This is the project management life cycle. And the most common is the version with five phases. It was developed by the Project Management Institute and includes conception and initiation, planning, execution, execution/monitoring and project closure.
Why do we talk about the project management life cycle?
Since the main topic of this article is about the clash of two roles - project manager and resource manager - it is worth pausing for a moment and taking a closer look at the image above. Why? Because the resource manager is involved in many of the stages depicted above and the processes that occur in each of them.
What is resource allocation and management?
To get a sense of the importance of resource management (or resource manager, to be more precise), let’s take a look at the summary of Wellington’s annual State of Project Management survey. The APM Body of Knowledge defines resource management as:
"(...) acquire, allocate and manage resources, such as people and their skills, finances, technology, materials, machinery and natural resources, required to complete a project. Resource management ensures that internal and external resources are used effectively, on time and within budget."
Simplifying the role of the resource manager
This is not the simplest definition due to the ambiguous terms, so it could be suitable for an academic dissertation. However, without going into too much detail, the general function of a resource manager job description is to plan, schedule and allocate the most useful, appropriate resources (usually employees or subcontractors with the right qualifications) to ensure that a project is delivered according to the required expectations and within the predetermined time and budget.