difference between project management and process management [closed]

Question

What is the difference between project management and process management?

Answer 1

The defining characteristic of process vs. project is repeatability vs. uniqueness.

• Process is a repetitive collection of interrelated tasks aimed at achieving a certain goal.

• Project is a unique endeavour with a beginning and an end undertaken to achieve a goal.

Process management has emphasis on increasing "repeatability" of the tasks, efficiency (descreasing time needed, reducing cost), increasing quality (including consistency in quality).

Project management has emphasis on getting the thing done, achieving the end result. Higher efficiency is harder to achieve since it might require custom tools and methods that can only be developed if the project was turned into a repetitive process.

Applied to software development making a daily build is a process:

• It's a sequence of tasks aimed at end result.

• The sequence is repetitive.

• Tasks are known on the outset, since the process is repetitive.

• When managing daily builds we want them to be cheap, fast and consistently meet quality standards, in most cases this is best achieved through increased automation.

Designing a new feature is a project:

• The feature is unique, once we've designed it we won't be designing it again. Maybe version two, but its going to be a different endeavour.

• At some point we need to stop designing the feature (even when its far from perfect) and it is best if we stipulate in advance how do we know that we've reached that point.

• We're not as much concerned with that the design is achieved though the most efficient sequence of steps, as with actually coming up with a sufficiently good design at the end.

• Hence the sequence of tasks that goes into design will be hard to automate and we need to concentrate on keeping the bounds, re-evaluating criterias, adjusting for newly discovered facts and generally moving the entire thing towards completion.

• We have to constantly select from an increasing number of possible tasks that come up in the light of newly discovered facts and pick these that will take us closer to the goal.

Answer 2

Process management would be management of a process, such as a software development process (note that I did not say "software process"). Such a process might be used across a variety of projects. A process does not have an end-product, beyond itself.

Project management would be management of a project, typically using some process, and resulting in a product, or a new version of a product.

Answer 3

If project is work that needs to be done to make an end result, be it a product or a service, then the process is the description of that work. Every project follows a process, even if not formally defined. By attempting to capture that process for each and every project a pattern will emerge that a similar process is being used for certain group or type of projects. It may also be shown that certain process leads to a better end result or leads to the end result faster and/or cheaper. Such process then may be adopted to be used for pertinent projects resulting in higher productivity and quality of end result. Consequently project management is application of the process to make an end result. There is no process management, just process development, implementation, measurement and improvement which in themselves are projects. Chicken or egg if you please.

Answer 4

Process is an abstraction of project. It is used to generalize the variation,uniqueness and transient nature projects.In order to enhance efficiency,productivity,effectiveness and value of product expected or achieved from a project,the implementation strategy or workflow mechanism for projects is analyzed with the help of process and/or processes.The goal of process is service while goal of project is a product.Process seek long term goals but project aim for short term goals.Project needs are based on end product but process needs are based on process itself.

Answer 5

The one sentence summary is process management manages how projects are generally run and has no deliverables other then documents explaining the process while project management is managing a project to insure that deliverables are created on budget and on time while following what ever process has been created through process management.

Answer 6

Process is basically the part of the project. process means certain rules has been followed for accomplishment of some task where as project means getting the things done by applying certain process

Answer 7

Well said the above one, the Process management defines the complete process of existing projects as documentation and give a status report to superiors. Even, they plan accordingly for the resource planning in their absence.

Answer 8

The defining characteristic of process vs. project is repeatability vs. uniqueness.

...best description I've ever heard. A poor analogy might be a process is like a day job, a project is like a contract.

In laymans terms a process is a bunch of tasks that need to be performed again and again to keep your organisation running. These tasks may be performed manually (by people in their day jobs) or automatically (by IT).

The eTOM Business Process Framework (www.tmforum.org) says there are three types of processes:

1. Strategy, Infrastructure & Product Lifecycle Management - a complicated way of saying all the tasks an organisation needs to do to plan for and build new stuff
2. Operations - all the daily tasks to keep things running & keep your customers happy
3. Enterprise Management - the rest... Like financial reporting, and so on

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Project is a unique endeavour with a beginning and an end undertaken to achieve a goal.

....guru

In laymans a bunch of tasks that you only perform once to build, change (or remove) your organisations capability (eg. it's infrastructure or products).

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How are they the same

To add a little more confusion to this dynamic, project management is a process in itself (see PRINCE2 www.prince2.com)

It would fit in the (1) Strategy, Infrastructure & Product category (sorry for flogging eTOM, there's plenty of other frameworks like ITIL and SCOR, I'm an EA at a Telco so its the framework I understand the best.)

Whilst each project has a start and finish date - chances are your organisation is forever building & changing is capability (infrastructure & products). So each project delivers something different but the steps, or bunch of tasks performed, to deliver the project should be the same each time (again see [PRINCE2][2]).