Managing projects is one of the largest responsibilities that a human resources department has. It could be a small project like organising an employee event or a large scale project such as implementing a new software solution. Regardless of size, projects are an important part of what we do.

Project management is the practice of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time.

A project is a temporary endeavour designed to produce a unique product, service or result with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or staffing) undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value.

The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast with business as usual (or operations), which are repetitive, permanent, or semi-permanent functional activities to produce products or services. In practice, the management of such distinct production approaches requires the development of distinct technical skills and management strategies. 

The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals within the given constraints.

This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. The primary constraints are scope, time, quality and budget.

The secondary and more ambitious — challenge is to optimise the allocation of necessary inputs and apply them to meet pre-defined objectives. The object of project management is to produce a complete project which complies with the client’s objectives. In many cases the object of project management is also to shape or reform the client’s brief in order to feasibly be able to address the client’s objectives.

Once the client’s objectives are clearly established they should influence all decisions made by other people involved in the project – for example project managers, designers, contractors and sub-contractors. Ill-defined or too tightly prescribed project management objectives are detrimental to decision making.

There’s one other aspect of project management that we need to keep in mind. It’s the people part. Successfully managing projects requires communication, decision making, problem solving, and conflict management.

Not only does HR need to know these things, but they need to make sure that everyone else knows them too. Because part of the reason that HR needs to know the principles of project management is so they can help the rest of the organisation learn them too.