Expert Answer
Operations management and project management have got certain similarities as well as differences and are both critical for organizational success.
Project management requires more inter disciplinary skills while operations management is more focused on a particular process and hence requires a certain skill of higher degree.
Project management is also about conducting a series of activity in a time bound and cost efficient manner and these activities occurs only once during the life of the project. While operations management is managing the repetitive occurrence of activity and ensuring the process is optimized to give an efficient output with continually improving efficiency and quality.
Project management is about managing people from different functional teams and aligning them to complete the project in time with efficient allocation of resources and capital. While operations management is all about driving and improving efficiency in a particular team responsible for carrying out an organizational process.
Project management has to always grapple with the scope as well as time and cost involved in the project while for operations management, the scope is set and the endeavor is to complete the work while incurring minimum cost or exhibit a trend of declining cost per unit of output.