What is Project Management?

When people hear project management, many immediately think of Gantt charts, RACI matrices, or long risk registers. Helpful? Sure. But here’s the truth: project management isn’t about the tools.

It’s about outcomes, process, people, and value.

Think of tools as the gear in your backpack—they help, but they’re not the journey. Project management is about:

• Understanding dependencies and priorities, not just making a plan.
  
  

• Facilitating collaboration and communication, not dictating tasks.
  
  

• Aligning people around purpose and impact, not just profit margins.
  
  

• Capturing lessons learned so successes can be repeated and failures avoided.
  
  

As Adam Savage once quipped: “The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.” The same applies here. Writing it down makes project management repeatable and scalable.