What is Project Management?

Project Management is essentially logically managing a Project initiative based on Priorities.
It is a process of Planning, Managing and coordinating an Initiative in order to achieve predefined objectives around Scope, cost, time, quality and resources. A Project as such is a unique initiative that has a defined duration, defined scope and limited funding.
Project Management as a Practice is not related to any one particular field or specialty. The concepts are equally applicable to Construction, IT, Manufacturing, Medicine etc, you name it.
There are lots of methodologies that are used in Today's world for executing projects predominantly either waterfall or Agile.
Irrespective of the methodology used, following are the steps you will use to implement a project,
 - Project Definition
 - Project Planning
 - Project Execution
 - Project Control and
 - Project Closure

Every project will not have the same set of Predefined steps, in the same order. Each project based on its needs (E.g  Project size, priorities etc may lay more importance on one section than other).Some projects may follow various combinations of these Project Steps,

Project Definition Phase
In this Phase, the Project Sponsors decide on the Project at a 10000 ft view i.e. it might not have enough clarity at this stage, they define the Goals and Objective they want to reach as a
Part of this Project.The Project sponsor decides on a Project Manager who can work on this Project. It is the project manager's job to get the required level of details for executing the Project Initiative. All the items planned so far are agreed upon and signed off by the requisite stakeholders.

Project Planning Phase
Following are the steps the Project Manager would follow in order to execute this step successfully.
Meet the stakeholders to understand the project Objectives, cost, budget and high level scope.
Project manager appoints the resources required. Project Manager decides on a high level time and cost estimate for the Project.

Project Execution Phase
In this Phase the PM already knows the resources and the tasks the Team is about to perform,The Team executes the Tasks as per the plan. The project manager assigns budget, allocates and monitors resource work in this phase of the project.

Project Control Phase
This phase basically may be run parallel to the execution phase. In this phase the Project Manager monitors the project wrt scope, time, cost, quality, budget and customer issues. There is risk management, resource management and time management involved in this phase

Project closing phase
In this Phase, the Team gets together and performs closure tasks, e.g identify training requests,preparing lessons learned document. Turning off/over equipment, hardware, software. etc, Project final review for Teams