By Buch Soham Jayesh
 
Project Management - An introduction
Management is getting things done by others. When management is applied to the constraints of the time, scope, cost for the achievement of pre-defined standard or quality it is identified as Project Management.
It is divided in three parts: Need – the starting point of the project, Expectations – targets through the unstated parts of execution of a project, and Quality- ensuring pre-defined standards are met in time and budget constraints.
 
Project Management Process
Project management process includes three stages: Initiating, Monitoring and controlling and Closing.

The initiation stage is the first and most important stage. In this stage, the project specifications are received for the approvals of the project. The documentation after the feasibility and approval checks are important part of this stage.

The monitoring and controlling stage is the project planning and execution base. There are four steps of the process. First of all, the project is planned though series of steps thought in advance such that the is very less requirement of changes. Though risks and failures are backed up with cross checking, referencing and backup plans. The next step is scheduling the planned activities. It specifies duration, sequence, resources, and co-ordination with the team members in a formal way. It also includes availability of resources at the potential failure stages and formal reporting and managing tasks in the unforeseen conditions. These stages set the mechanism and therefore they are completed before the execution of the project. Once the system is set, the activities are initiated. Then the controlling stage comes into picture. In this stage, the deviation at every stage is identified and changes in the processes are made to make sure that the quality remains as required. For this re-planning and re-scheduling becomes compulsory to ensure that various resources are there during the execution of the project. This stage is very crucial as it always remains work-in-progress and ensures the success of the project.

The last stage is closing of the project. In this stage, the project is delivered, reviewed by the customer for acceptance - accuracy and standards. If the quality of the project is not as per the contractual terms, there may come the revision stages that require additional efforts from execution team. Further, this stage provides feedback and the consideration receipt. Sometimes the satisfied clients lead to references and new projects; though dissatisfied clients could range from discounted consideration to the lawsuits. Thus, project management process ensures management of cost, quality, human resources, communication, risk, change and documentation.
 
Benefits
Project Management helps in understanding key result areas and resources available before any project is accepted. It convenes understanding the feasibility of the execution of the project. It provides input in identifying undefined points of contract for a project. It ensures the planning, scheduling and assignment of tasks and guarantee the success of the project. It supports the optimum utilization of resources to ensure the cost in terms of time and money remains minimal. It suggests the risk and failure points; and assists in preparing backup plans. It provides challenges to the management so that they can perform at the best of their abilities for the organizational objectives.

Project Management for Language Entrepreneurs
In modern times, the project management have been providing valuable insights and support to many businesses passing through hard times. It certainly has a scope to help the Language Entrepreneurs as language entrepreneur is a developing business in developing nations.
Language entrepreneurs face many challenges. Some of them are as follows: Lack of vision about the completions and delivery of the project in the initiation stage, less communication with the customer with reference to the stage by stage development, weaker communication of doubts and queries conveyed to client and receiving their solutions through coordinated efforts in time, lack of risk management rigor, no formal documentation from acceptance of project through contract - the process record management to completion of the project, weaker or irregular check system formation to ensure the health of the system, inappropriate priority management in the work flow according to constantly changing priorities, lack of visionary skills to identify the loads on resources, weaker preparedness to make drastic changes in the unforeseen conditions, inability to control the scope of the work when faced with extraordinary conditions either from client side or resources side, inaccurate planning and scheduling resulting in multiple risk and system failure threats etc.
To deal with these challenges project management provides tool integration, scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, communication, risk, procurement of resources, documentation, and change. Through implementation of project management linguistic aspects such as errors in terminology, syntactic error, agreement error, misspelling, punctuation errors, other miscellaneous errors, and omission can be avoided. Terminology related queries can be managed with adherence to project glossaries, identical untranslatable, tags and identical tags.  Further, non-linguistic approaches such as inconsistency, segment level checks, and formatting including many areas but not limited to quotation, brackets, parenthesis, number etc can also be taken care of. Thus, the cooperation between top and executive management and client can be assured that results in to higher success chances.

Concluding Remarks
Project management has smoothened the problems for the small, medium, and large scale businesses that face difficulty in management. Entrepreneurs in language business domain and other start-ups should consider aspects of project management before finalizing their standard business practices to achieve optimum efficiency levels.

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