CHALLENGES OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT ALIGNING TO THE PROCESS GROUPS THAT CAN FULFIL THE CLIENTS’ EXPECTATIONS.

G. V. Bhanu Sai Prasad 1 , V. B. N. V Sai 1 and Dr. Kiran Kumar Reddi 2 . 1. Research Scholar, Rayalaseema university, Kurnool India. 2. Department of Computer Science, Krishna University, Machilipatnam. ...................................................................................................................... Manuscript Info Abstract ......................... ........................................................................ Manuscript History

In general, Project Manager masters the project management methods and processes. Upon to the dynamic changes in the projects, project management needs adaptability and willingness to deal the unexpected situations. Project Managers building these abilities can gain customer confidence and can fulfill the exact needs of the clients' expectations. In this paper the challenges are properly aligned to the process groups considering their impact. Project management if consider these challenges can fold the project delays and can manage the dynamic situations. With the recent trends and changes in the process, irrespective of the methods followed every project goes through the project management process groups. Project manager needs to chalk out or list out all the challenges such that (s) he being the project representative in the organization as well to the client, needs to make all the stake holders responsible to deliver a product or project which fulfill the exact needs of the client or customer. Project Manager is always surrounded by a plenty of challenges, where the challenges need prioritization by aligning them with the knowledge areas as well the process groups can yield more success to the overall project. Let's discuss here if project manager aligns the challenges to the respective process groups by strengthening the approach, can pave way to the success of the project and gain the customer confidence.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….... Introduction:-
There are three most important elements in project management: quality, scope and cost. A so-called -triple constraint‖ is the main factor determining the quality and success of the project. They constrain to each other because the relationship between them is mutual in a sense that if there is any change on one of them, the rest will be affected.
Project management involves planning, scheduling and controlling all of the project activities to achieve its objectives. In other words, project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements. Project management is accomplished through the application and integration of the project management processes of initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, controlling and closing ((Duncan 2000, 8). The tasks of managing a project are limitless as operational practices; however, they can be summarized in these few key roles: Every project differentiates itself by its uniqueness and the purpose of its existence. Therefore, requirements of the project need to be identified and analyzed clearly.
Objectives of a project need to be defined and need to be communicated to all team members. The objects should be achievable and need to be clear, in order for each of the team members to understand and implement efficiently.

Role of Project Manager:-
Project Management is often the responsibility of an individual project manager. The individual participates directly in the activities that produce the end result. Project manager strives to maintain the progress and also the mutual interaction and the tasks of various people/members by finding a way to reduce the risk of overall failure, and restricting costs, leading to maximize the benefits.
Most of the project management issues that influence a project arise from risk, which in turn arises from uncertainty. A successful project manager focuses on this as his/her main concern and attempts to mitigate risk significantly, often by adhering to a policy of open communication, ensuring that project participants can voice their opinions and concerns.
Project tools or techniques and knowledge are used for managing projects and are unique to Project Management.

Extended Study On The Challenges:-
This study is done mainly on the Tools and techniques that Project Manager can concentrate. Below are the mentioned challenges which are 20 C's. Understanding and applying the tools and techniques which are generally recognized as good practices are not sufficient alone for effective project management. Effective project management requires that the project manager understands and uses the knowledge and skills on the below technical/management challenges.
The literature on the study of the project manager challenges are detailed below. Customer:-Customer or Client is the most important person as far as project is considered. Project manger's first challenge is customer/client. To become an efficient project manager, streamlining of self is necessary and the focus needs to be on the following. a. Engaging Customer as part of the team. b. Planning at least one formal status call with Customer as well delivery team. c. Formalizing weekly status reports. d. Revisiting or managing the issues and risks often weekly upon availability of project time. e. Communicate effectively, by keeping everyone in the project up to speed with both formal and informal (emails, phone calls, etc.) modes of communication

Concept:-
Concept is one of the critical challenges being faced by the project manager in the Initiation phase. This is to evaluate the new idea on how the project is going to be. A concept is an orderly and efficient approach to suggest, review and judging the merit of a new project idea prior to the significant resources are committed to the official project. And this is to ensure that resources get allocated only to worthwhile projects. This also helps in procurement of requirements and other resources.
Charter:-What's a Project Charter? This is also called as Project overview statement (POS), is the signed document that formally defines and authorizes a project. This is like reaching to an agreement, which includes scope, objectives and constraints.
Why a Project Charter is needed?
The Project charter keeps all the people involving in the project on the same page, such that the goals of the project are often understood correctly by the stake holders.
On a brief, the project charter contains the following Project Authorization, Project Manager Authorization, Key Stake holders, Project Goals, Project Priorities, Scope statement, product requirements, project assumptions, project constraints & boundaries, Initial project risks, list of deliverables, cost estimates, schedule estimates, integrated change control and success criteria.

Clarity:-
Why Clarity is needed? Project manager has to define the goals clearly, if not entire team and project can suffer. Right questions are to be from the project manager to establish the goals and communicate to the team with added clarity.
Clarity is one of the challenges to be considered at all the process groups of the project management. Communication is the most important element to project success and yet it remains a challenge throughout the engagement. The information which is being propagated by a project manager needs to be clear and needs to dissolve weak links to soothe conflicts, to report status, and to revise the schedule.

Creativity:-
Why to bother about Creativity? Creativity is a matter of survival and a must approach to grow and innovate. Organization that doesn't innovate inevitable ages and decline. \ Creativity is the art of producing new ideas, approaches and actions. Creativity is a starting point for innovation. Starts with problem identification and ends with a creative idea.
A Project manager should overcome the two types of barriers to creativity 1. Personal Barriers Beliefs and attitudes, taking life seriously, Time availability, thinking the self is not creative and comparing to others. Fear of failure.

Organizational Barriers
Risk avoidance, Change resistance, Leadership style, Group think, Lack of motivation

1981
To overcome the barriers a project manager can be curious enough, persistent, have full of energy, self-motivated, open minded, risk taker and having diverse experience and social to others.
Creativity helps project manager for problem solving, improving process and final product as well services. It gives Quality and value to management as well helps in turning risk to opportunity.
Cost:-Project managers are in a tough spot: They're the liaison between the customer and the project team that will complete the customer's project. In most organizations, it's generally easier to get more time than money, and there's usually more concern about how much than how long. Project managers and their stakeholders need to go into any project with a common goal: Identify an affordable scope and a plan of how to achieve it. Too often, and maybe because of the subject matter itself, cost is ignored in project planning. For projects to be successful, someone has to foot the bill, and until the estimate is requested or provided, it's not a mystery, just a constant dread.
If the customer demands new deliverables in the project scope, however, a price tag is usually associated with those demands. When the project scope changes, the budget usually has to change as well. Changes generally cost something, and that means a budget increase.

Creep:-
When inexperienced project managers start on their first few projects they usually underestimate the power of scope creep to cause a project to fail. This is why knowing how to avoid scope creep is absolutely vital to a successful project management career and trying to implement the following points: 1. Write an accurate project scope statement 2. All the accurate project requirements are documented and approved. 3. Strictly enforce the change request process.
How to avoid Scope Creep? Never forget what your project scope is. Everyone will continually try to get you to make seemingly "small" scope changes, which you should resist.

Communication:-
Communication is the most important element to project success and yet it remains a challenge throughout the engagement. Project manager has to communicate quickly and efficiently at all levels of business. The project manager must be a confident communicator and must be connected within the organization. The well-connected project manager can break down barriers and get critical tasks done for his projects that others cannot. Customers want and need a project manager who is ready to lead and make things happen and can work well with all levels within his own organization for the success of the projects he manages.
A common problem is managers get lost in translation of the requirements. Project Manager needs to ensure the requirements need to be very crisp which helps in avoiding the kind of miscommunication.
Clear communication in requirements always provides edge to the Project manager in handling mutli-dimensional and complex projects by overcoming the challenges.
Competence:-What is competence? A competent professional is generally understood to be someone who "can do the job." What then is project management competence? What are the knowledge, skills, and attitude that project managers must possess? It is generally agreed that the overall scope of competence covers these three areas. Knowledge consists of the general and specific project management theory, concepts, practices, procedures, processes, and methodologies that apply to an industry and the complexity of projects being conducted. The project manager must first possess knowledge of the technical aspects of the industry to an extent that he or she understands the product and service being built and delivered. The business aspects are typically described in project management literature that address schedule, cost, risk, and other functions that relate to the overall management of a project.
Skills are the application of knowledge to project work that ensures accomplishment of the work in an effective and efficient manner. The skill functions are those defined by the industry, project size, project complexity, and organizational perspective for projects. A project manager may not possess all the detailed skills for the project, but may rely on others to perform designated tasks.
Attitude is the personal and professional demeanor exhibited by a person while performing his or her work. In the context of competence, this would be a positive outlook and an ability to not take one's self too seriously. Attitude includes drive, energy, good instincts, and dedication. A project manager must demonstrate the correct attitude when working with all the project stakeholders, e.g., project team, senior management, customer, and special interest groups.

Create/Charts:-
Scheduling is based on experience and the more experience you have, the more accurate your schedule will be. However, you can still produce an accurate schedule by following some simple rules.
Never give off-the-cuff or unconsidered responses, i.e. don't commit to something you can't deliver. Eliminate uncertainty wherever you can. Build in plenty of contingency to cope with variation. Pick the right level of granularity. Schedule the unexpected.
Project management is the art of handling the unknown. Often events and circumstances you could not have foreseen will interrupt the flow of your project. It's your job to take them all in your stride. Schedule for the most likely delays and cope with them should they arise. If experience or instinct tells you that a certain type of task will overrun, then anticipate it, pad it with some contingency and make sure you have adequate resources on hand when it comes up.

Complexity:-A. What is Complexity?
Project complexity is often recognized in a general way, but not completely understood by everyone. Just the term -Complexity‖ causes some degree of difficulty because of the different interpretations given the definition and perhaps a person's experiences and training. Exploring the fundamental meaning of -complex‖ is helpful in establishing a foundation from which to build. -Complex‖ comes from the Latin word complexes, meaning entwined or twisted together.
During execution project manager may be struggling with problem solving, discovered complexity can be overstated. Following project completion, some complexity challenges may be viewed in context from a more realistic point of view without the means to influence what happened.

Projects have two primary areas for complexity
Technical Complexity:-Technical scope of the product and service may be viewed as creating a specification that leads to a design to meet the client's needs.

Management Complexity:-
Management complexity includes the business aspects of the project, staff, relationships of the project to others, and project organization to name a few. There are many variables that can add complexity to the management of a project.

ISSN: 2320-5407
Int. J. Adv. Res. 5(6), 1978-1988 1985 the three main constraints that bound any project --Time (the deadline), Resources (the people, materials and money available to do the project), and Output (the required deliverables).
Any change that affects one of these constraints can seriously affect the ultimate delivery of the project. For instance, if the deadline is tightened, you will need more resources to deliver the same output. If the resources available are reduced (usually in the form of lost people), you will likely need more time to deliver the output. If the output requirements change (usually added functionality or features) you will need either more time or more resources.
When changes take place they should be properly documented.  Who is requesting the change?  What change are they asking to be made? (Must be documented in great detail)  How important is this change?
 What impact will this change have on the project? (Time, Resources, Output)  Does the client approveof the change to the project? (Time, Resources, Output)  How will the existing project plan change to incorporate the change?  Who is authorizing the change? Just because the person is requesting the change, doesn't mean they have the authority to approve the change. The project manager must get this request infront of the person with the authority to approve the changes.

Culture/Cross-functional:-
Cross-functional teams are significantly different from teams that are aligned on one functional level. For example, a group of marketing people generally "speak the same language," and they have a solid understanding of what their department is trying to accomplish. With a cross-functional team, you may have representatives from a wide array of specialtiesfinance, accounting, operations, legal, human resourcesand each person has his or her own perspective and issues. This diversity is both the reason why cross-functional teams can be highly effective, but it's also the reason that they're often problematic.

Leadership is Essential:-
It's not enough to simply manage a cross-functional team -you must lead it. Strong leadership creates and fosters team unity, and that leadership is key to your success. Because of outside pressures, this type of team must have internal strength and commitment to survive. At the same time, the team leader has to know when and how to allow functional experts to take the lead. After all, when you bring together a group of highly talented people, many individuals within the team may know more about the problemfrom their own perspectivethan the team leader. This situation requires a careful leadership balance. Tasks must be tightly coordinated and organized, and yet people must be free to use their talents and expertise as needed.
Cohesiveness:-Project manager can generally use the following five techniques or methods to keep my remote projects and teams running smoothly:  Setup a communication plan from the start  Use a collaborative PM tool  Hold weekly internal team meetings  Expect participation from each member on formal customer calls  Meet for major phase kickoffs What I want to do is discuss this chart as it relates to project management and from a positive point of view. Instead of looking at this from five dysfunctions, the author also listed 5 functions of a cohesive team. This consists of the following: 1. They trust one another. 2. They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas. 3. They commit to decisions and plans of action. 4. They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans. 5. They focus on the achievement of collective results.
1986 Closure:-Project closure is the last phase of the project management process. The project process is completed and documented, and the finished product is transferred to the care and control of the owner. The long-term objective is to build a project management repository to document best practices, lessons learned, and examples of various documents that may be developed during a project.
Project management processes produce the following deliverables during the closing stage of the project life cycle: Basic Project : Lessons Learned, Closing Report Full Project : Lessons Learned, Closing Report Findings:-In this paper as mentioned, the challenges when are aligned to the project management process groups, convinced many of the managers and project management teams across different organizations. These challenges provoked thoughts in the management teams that what is missing in the projects day in and day out. The best finding of the survey is "Whatever project life cycle methods we follow either water-fall or agile, these challenges if considered can boost the confidence of the project management team" A detailed questionnaire was presented to the multiple teams and management members, yielded positive responses supporting the consideration of the challenges.
The challenges post aligning to the PM process groups can be as mentioned below. Project manager must demonstrate the competence through on-the-job performance as validated by an independent assessment of qualifications. As project complexity increases, there is a greater need to look for simple solutions that work. Use complex solutions only when necessary and use them infrequently. By utilizing project management principles, understanding the dynamics of conflict, and learning approaches to conflict resolution, managers will be able to establish an environment in which creativity and innovation is encouraged and project goals are accomplished. Critical thinking project managers are those who consider themselves accountable for the project, as they are willing to take ownership of the success or failure of their projects 1987 Conclusion:-Project Manager a sole and multitasker of small and simultaneous projects within the envelope of an overall project can distinguish the process groups for the multiple and overall project to the challenges mentioned. Project management or team can overcome the challenges ease to manage the stake holders and the project/s resulting improving success of the overall project and can gain the confidence and reach expectations of the client.
There is a scope of future work improving or extending these challenges or each to the individual challenges.
Aligning the challenges to the process groups improves the project management team abilities and adaptability to the technical and non-technical changes coming across in the overall project. And these challenges unfolds the success stories of the multiple projects and pave way to the success as well fulfill the exact needs of the client or reaching the exact client expectations.