Project Management

Terminology Importance Initiating Planning Executing Closing Tips Books E-books Journals Project Management Courses Websites Database

Terminology

Project - temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. It has a definite beginning and end.

Project Management - process of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time.

Project Charter - project charter, project definition, or project statement is a statement of the scope, objectives, and participants in a project. It provides a preliminary delineation of roles and responsibilities, outlines the project objectives, identifies the main stakeholders, and defines the authority of the project manager. It serves as a reference of authority for the future of the project.

Risk Register - risk is evident in everything we do. When it comes to project management, understanding risk and knowing how to minimize its impacts (or take full advantage of its opportunities) on your project are essential for success. A Risk Register is a tool for documenting risks, and actions to manage each risk. The Risk Register is essential to the successful management of risk. As risks are identified they are logged on the register and actions are taken to respond to the risk.

Business Case - A Business Case explains why a project is needed, and the changes and benefits that it is designed to deliver.

Project Deliverable - Project Deliverable provide a complete list of the required products or outcomes that the project must create or acquire.

Importance

Project Cycle

Initiating: goals, specifications, tasks and responsibilities
Planning: schedules, budgets, resources, risks and staffing
Executing: status reports, changes, quality and forecasts
Closing: train customer, transfer documents, release resources, evaluation and lessons learned

Project Management Cycle

Initiating
Planning
Executing
Closing

Importance

Project Management helps to :

establish a schedule and plan,
organize chaos,
reduce risks and cut costs,
improve success rate,
maximize resources,
identify, manage and control quality,
retain and use knowledge,
learn from failure,

Initiating

There are six key steps that you need to take to properly initiate a new project:

Develop a Business Case
Undertake a Feasibility Study
Establish the Project Charter
Appoint the Project Team
Set up the Project Office
Perform a Phase Review

Project Initiation Phase is the first phase in the Project Management Life Cycle. It involves starting up a new project. It consists of defining project's objectives, scope, purpose and deliverables. Project team are hired, project office is setup and the project is reviewed, to gain approval to begin the next phase.

To define a project scope, you must first identify the following things:

Project objectives
Goals
Sub-phases
Tasks
Resources
Budget Schedule

Once you've established these things, you'll then need to clarify the limitations or parameters of the project and clearly identify any aspects that are not to be included. In specifying what will and will not be included, the project scope must make clear to the stakeholders, senior management and team members involved, what product or service will be delivered.

Planning

The Project Planning Phase is the second phase in the project life cycle. It involves creating a set of plans to help guide your team through the execution and closure phases of the project.

The plans created during this phase will help you manage time, cost, quality, change, risk and issues. They will also help you manage staff and external suppliers, to ensure that you deliver the project on time and within budget.

There are 10 Project Planning steps you need to take to complete the Project Planning Phase efficiently

Create a project plan
Create a resource plan
Create a financial plan
Create a quality plan
Create a risk plan
Create an acceptance plan
Create a communications plan
Create a procurement plan
Contract the suppliers
Perform a phase review

The Project Planning Phase is often the most challenging phase for a Project Manager, as you need to make an educated guess of the staff, resources and equipment needed to complete your project.

You may also need to plan your communications and procurement activities, as well as contract any 3rd party suppliers. In short, you need to create a comprehensive suite of project plans which set out a clear project roadmap ahead.

Communication planning

A project communication plan is a blueprint for communication processes during your project. The plan should help provide the right information to the right person at the right time in a format that works for them. Having a plan will:

Make it easier to secure stakeholder buy-in and support
Set expectations with stakeholders, the project team, and external vendors
Improve decision making
Keep the team up-to-date with current and upcoming tasks
Define roles and responsibilities, for example, who needs to attend weekly status meetings
Improve meetings
Outline processes for dealing with risks and issues

Creating a communication plan typically takes place during the planning phase of your project. There are five key steps to follow when preparing this document:

Outline the objectives
Define the audience
Decide what information is needed
Chose methods and frequency
Measure Success

Executing

Project Execution Phase is the third phase in the project life cycle. In this phase, you will build the physical project deliverables. The Project Execution Phase is usually the longest phase in the project life cycle and it typically consumes the most energy and the most resources.

To enable you to monitor and control the project during this phase, you will need to implement a range of management processes. These processes help you to manage time, cost, quality, change, risks and issues. They also help you to manage procurement, customer acceptance and communications.

1. Build the Deliverables - This phase involves physically constructing each deliverable for acceptance by the customer. The activities undertaken to construct each deliverable will vary depending on the type of project being undertaken. Activities may be undertaken in a 'waterfall' fashion, where each activity is completed in sequence until the final deliverable is produced, or in an 'iterative' fashion, where iterations of each deliverable are constructed until the deliverable meets the requirements of the customer. Regardless of the method used to construct each deliverable, careful monitoring and control processes should be employed to ensure that the quality of the final deliverable meets the acceptance criteria set by the customer.

2. Monitor and Control - While the project team are physically producing each deliverable, the project manager implements a series of management processes to monitor and control the activities being undertaken by the project team. An overview of each management process follows.

Time management
Cost management
Change management
Risk management
Issue management
Procurement management
Acceptance management
Communications management

3. Time Management - process of recording and controlling time spent by staff on the project. As time is a scarce resource within projects, each team member should record time spent undertaking project activities on a timesheet form. This will enable the project manager to control the amount of time spent undertaking each activity within the project. A timesheet register is also completed, providing a summary of the time spent on the project in total so that the project plan can always be kept fully up to date.

4. Risk Management - process by which risks to the project are formally identified, quantified and managed. A project risk may be identified at any stage of the project by completing a risk form and recording the relevant risk details within the risk register.

5. Cost Management - process by which costs/expenses incurred on the project are formally identified, approved and paid. Expense forms are completed for each set of related project expenses such as labor, equipment and materials costs. Expense forms are approved by the project manager and recorded within an expense register for auditing purposes.

6. Issue management - method by which issues currently affecting the ability of the project to produce the required deliverable are formally managed. After an issue form has been completed and the details logged in the issue register, each issue is evaluated by the project manager and a set of actions undertaken to resolve the issue identified.

7. Quality Management - defined as the extent to which the final deliverable conforms to the customer requirements. Quality management is the process by which quality is assured and controlled for the project, using quality assurance and quality control techniques. Quality reviews are undertaken frequently and the results recorded on a quality review form.

8. Procurement Management - process of sourcing products from an external supplier. Purchase orders are used to purchase products from suppliers, and a procurement register is maintained to track each purchase request through to its completion.

9. Change Management - process by which changes to the project scope, deliverables, timescales or resources are formally requested, evaluated and approved prior to implementation. A core aspect of the project manager's role is to manage change within the project. This is achieved by understanding the business and system drivers requiring the change, identifying the costs and benefits of adopting the change, and formulating a structured plan for implementing the change. To formally request a change to the project, a change form is completed. The status of all active change forms should he recorded within a change register.

10. Acceptance management - process of gaining customer acceptance for deliverables produced by the project. Acceptance forms are used to enable project staff to request acceptance for a deliverable, once complete. Each acceptance form identifies the acceptance criteria, review methods and results of the acceptance reviews undertaken.

11. Communications management - process by which formal communications messages are identified, created, reviewed and communicated within a project. The most common method of communicating the status of the project is via a project status report. Each communications message released is captured in a communications register.

Closing

The Project Closure Phase is the fourth and last phase in the project life cycle. In this phase, you will formally close your project and then report its overall level of success to your sponsor.

Project Closure involves handing over the deliverables to your customer, passing the documentation to the business, cancelling supplier contracts, releasing staff and equipment, and informing stakeholders of the closure of the project.

After the project has been closed, a Post Implementation Review is completed to determine the projects success and identify the lessons learned.

The closing phase of the project is when the project has achieved the planned objectives and all deliverables have been completed. Activities in this phase include:

Project Evaluation
Identify things that went well, and things that didn’t
Project Final Reports
Closing Contracts
Administrative Close
Team Reassignments
Distribute Lessons Learned

Project Closure steps:

Confirm work is done as per the requirements
Complete procurement closure
Gain formal acceptance
Complete final performance reporting
Index and archive records
Update lessons learned
Hand-off completed product
Release the resources
Celebrate the success

There are four fundamentally different ways to terminate a project:

Termination by extinction
Termination by addition
Termination by integration
Termination by starvation

Tips

Understand how Risk Management works
Define your project
Get input from others
Identify the consequences of each risk
Eliminate irrelevant issues
List all identified risk elements
Assign probability
Assign impact
Determine risk for the element
Rank the risks

A quality plan needs to cover a number of elements:

What needs to go through a quality check?
What is the most appropriate way to check the quality?
When should it be carried out?
Who should be involved?
What "Quality Materials" should be used?

Books

Project Management by Harold R. Kerzner

Call Number: HD 69 .P75 K47 2017

ISBN: 1119165350

Publication Date: 2017

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