Project Management

Experience plays a major role in managing a project. The project manager needs to know the subject to some degree and have a good idea as to what types of resources are available to complete a project. A project manager also needs to have a good idea of what steps should happen to manage a project from start to finish. Experience is the only thing that can help really refine the process and to allow a process to come in most economically.

The need to ask the right questions comes from repetitively working on projects. Knowing what to ask and how to ask questions of the receiving parties takes skill and practice. Just asking the question and not being able to analyze it for the real meaning takes someone who can interpret what people are really trying to say.

A project manager needs to know how to break out the work for a project. A seasoned person will already have a good idea of what tasks need to happen and in what order they need to be happen in. This person will be able to estimate time and costs associated with each task with much greater accuracy. Experience can help but experience could also be a detriment when calculating these items. If the project manager a bad experience on a previous project where everything went wrong he or she may be prone to pad the time and costs too much which could make the reality of the project too costly and/or time prohibitive.

These past experiences a seasoned project manager has had with projects can affect more than their decisions on time and costs. Bad experiences can with similar projects could make a project manager look at their current project in a negative way immediately. This could cause the project to fail even before it begins. Attitude really can make or break a project. If a different project manager has had great experiences previously with similar projects, he or she could make their current project come in ahead of schedule and under budget. Experience does play a lot into these negative and positive attitudes but also the relationship of the project manager with the people that the project is for or the project team can affect the outcome or even the start of a project. If the project manager has had positive experiences with these people the project will run much more smoothly and probably come out quite successful but if there are personality conflicts or a myriad of different negative items between these parties a project could complete very poorly or even fail.

The type of team that works on a project also affects the outcome greatly. If this team has worked on other projects that were similar in