Personally, I look at project management as a basic life skill, so fundamental that I doubt any productive person can truly shy away from practicing most of them. It may not be 100% at the same time – such as managing a large and intense project – but they are exercises routinely. With the myriad of possibilities of actions, there are myriad of project types. This article did touch some of the common ones, but there are many others. Let’s just look at some professions and the likely projects:

1. Teachers – Can each course be viewed through the lens of a project? Courses have start and end dates, there are objectives – learning goals, and there are stakeholders. The outcome is unique as each student gain something different.

2. Event planners – I love the movie Wedding Crashers. It reminds me that even the best planned project can have someone crashing the party.

3. Real estate agents – Is helping sellers selling their houses or working with buyers wanting to find apartments any different than a typical project – temporary and unique? True, there are often more early or unexpected termination in this business, but the project management skills of managing people, time, scope, budget, risks, vendors, communication, stakeholder, and desirability of the house (quality) are the same. Great real estate integrates all these plus more.

… In short, there are many problems for project managers, some big and some small. But the PM skills are some of the life’s most essential skills.

Te Wu’s comments on the below article

Domhnall O’Huigin on Quora for Forbes writes: What problem are businesses trying to solve when they hire project managers? originally appeared on Quora: The best answer to any question.  They are trying to solve the problem of not having someone to coordinate and drive the execution of changes the business wants to happen.  There may be projects that only very large enterprises will embark on – only multinationals will have the challenge of opening a new office in a country other than their home one for example – but by and large most types of projects are common across most sizes of company.  For example:

Technology deployment projects. Rolling out new telephony, workstations, applications.
Efficiency projects. Producing Cost Take Out, Resource Actions.

Product projects. Bringing a new product to market.
Customer Satisfaction projects.
HR related projects. For example, surveys, absorption of a workforce via a merger, TUD related items, etc.

Sure there are projects outside those archetypes, there always are, and rolling out a telephone system across a geo is very different to changing the mobile phone provider for your six employees, but by and large the only differences are scale and complexity/number of tasks.

Back to the question: the project manager is someone who takes the business goal (“I want a new tool for reporting our Key Performance Metrics automatically instead of manually”) and is responsible for ensuring it happens. If the project sponsor (normally “the boss”) were to do this – assuming they had the skillset to do so – then they’d be taking away time from doing their job of being the boss, hence they get a PM to do it for them (and so they can have one neck to choke!).  This question originally appeared on Quora. Ask a question, get a great answer. Learn from experts and access insider knowledge. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.     SNIP, the article continues @  Forbes, click here to continue reading…..