Management and Strategy

You will hear this word strategy everywhere, but what does it really mean?

Strategy comes from Greek word stratrgos, which is military term used to describe art of general.

So what is Strategy in business terms?

Strategy is plan that gives the enterprise a competitive advantage over rivals through differentiation. Strategy is about understanding what you do, what you want to become, and most importantly focusing on how you plan to get there. It is also about what you don’t do; it draws boundaries around the scope of a company’s intentions.

So today morning before going to office I wrote a post on 3R’s of Project Management being Requirements, Resources and Required Time. In office I started talking about project management with my colleague Chris. Chris works in QA team. He started explaining me his 3R’s of Project management being Quality, Resources and Required Time. It was amazing because he did not know about my post or my perspective on the topic.  I guess that is what differentiates the role of PM from QA.

This difference in perspective is very important for a successful team.

Note: Very soon I want to blog about Scrum which is an Agile method of project management.

Managing projects is a very simple process. There are basically 3 parameters in every project

1. Requirements
2. Resources
3. Required Time

Project management is just juggling these 3 parameters. If any one of these changes at least one of the other two will change. For e.g you cannot reduce time by not increasing resources or reducing requirements.

Then why is project management so difficult and why do so many project get in trouble? I guess because finally juggling these 3 R’s is just an ART and not a SCIENCE. J