Card 404

1) What does the author mean by technical and sociocultural aspects of project management?

The technical side of project management is a highly structured, logical and disciplined process. It consists of scheduling, planning, creating a work breakdown and documenting these activities. As a result, all aspects of the technical dimension should be traceable via a documented record.

The socio-cultural aspect of project management is not as pretty. It deals with teamwork, motivation, and interpersonal relationships as well as various political and customer-relations issues.

These two dimensions are “two sides of the same coin” due to the fact that they both involve the same group of people. The link between the two sides is the project manager (PM). She must use her knowledge, experience (and maybe a sense of humor!) to keep the two dimensions in harmony.

Unfortunately, not all project managers have such a balanced perspective. Some are highly skilled – perhaps even obsessive -- at the technical aspects. On the other hand, they lack the stability or patience to manage their human resources. Others are great “people managers” but lack technical skills or have technical inability. An effective PM must be able to carefully balance both sides.

Technical Aspects:

* Scope

* Work Breakdown Structure

* Schedules

* Resource allocation

* Baseline budgets

* Status reports

Socio-cultural Aspects:

* Leadership

* Problem solving

* Teamwork

* Negotiation

* Politics

* Customer expectations

2) Project management is a continual balance between three main elements. What are they? 

Answer: The three elements are scope, budget, and time. It is also called the triple constraints.

The triple constraint of project management describes the interdependency between the three cornerstones of a project:

(1) Scope: all the work we have to do in order to create the clearly specified product. This is merely what needs to be...