Project management is the practice of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and criteria at a specified time.  The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals within the given constraints.  The primary constraints are scope, time, quality and budget.  

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Traditionally project management includes four to five stages and a control system. The major stages or processes generally include:

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• Initiation - The initiating processes determines the nature and scope of the project.

• Planning - The project is planned to an appropriate level of detail.  The main purpose is to plan time, cost and resources adequately to estimate the work needed, and to effectively manage risk during project execution.

• Production or execution - The execution or implementation phase ensures that the project management plan's deliverables are executed accordingly. This phase involves proper allocation, co-ordination and management of human resources and any other resources such as material and budgets.

• Monitoring and controlling - Monitoring and controlling consists of those processes performed to observe project execution so that potential problems can be identified in a timely manner and corrective action can be taken, when necessary, to control the execution of the project.

• Closing - Closing includes the formal acceptance of the project and the ending. Administrative activities include the archiving of the files and documenting lessons learned.

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DMS has experience developing RACI matrix's to assign roles and responsibilities as well as utilizing software as a control system.