Project Management Essentials You Always Wanted To Know

4th Edition

Vibrant Publishers

• Publisher: Vibrant Publishers
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781949395402
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Gestion de projet

• Includes Chapter Summaries and Solutions to Practice Exercises
• Simplified Project Management concepts
• Practical approaches to be applied to projects
• Best Practices used in contemporary projects
• Project Management Templates

As employees first move towards management, they typically take on management of critical projects. Project Management Essentials You Always Wanted To Know: 4th Edition provides the core information about how to manage the complexity of modern projects, including subjects such as:

• A project management overview
• Project Initiation - Constraints, Stakeholders, PMO, Life Cycles
• Project Planning - WBS, PERT/CPM, Budgeting, Risk
• Project Execution - Audits, HR, Communications
• Project Monitoring & Controlling - Tracking, Quality Control, Change Control
• Project Closure

About the Series

The Self-Learning Management series is designed to help students, new managers, career switchers and entrepreneurs learn essential management lessons. This series is designed to address every aspect of business from HR to Finance to Marketing to Operations, be it any industry. Each book includes basic fundamentals, important concepts, standard and well-known principles as well as practical ways of application of the subject matter. The distinctiveness of the series lies in that all the relevant information is bundled in a compact form that is very easy to interpret.

Project Planning

Once a project is initiated it goes into the planning stage. During this stage we prepare the project plan for the project. The project plan gives details of how the project will be executed, monitored and controlled.

Planning starts with the Scope where it is decided what needs to be done. It is followed by Time planning where we decide how we will deliver the scope and how much time that would take. Then we estimate the detailed cost of the project work which is followed by planning quality, human resource and communication requirements. Finally, the various risks on the project are identified and managed and procurement documents are created in case the project will be buying any products or services from outside vendors/suppliers/sub-contractors.

Scope Planning

In order for us to deliver a project, the first and the most important thing to know is what the scope of the product is. The product scope includes the features and characteristics of the product that will be the outcome of the project.

Scope Planning is one of the most critical areas because all other planning areas depend upon it. If some scope is missed out or defined incorrectly or ambiguously, then the entire plan would be incorrect and may have to be redone later on. This could lead to huge time and cost overrun on the project.

Scope planning is one area that might work differently for different kinds of projects. Some projects are simply given a project charter with high-level requirements and then the detailed scope is planned. Some other projects are won through competitive bidding. In such projects, detailed scope is already planned before the project is given. This is generally seen in those industries where projects are won through tenders. Although scope planning is done in both types of projects in the same way, it is only the timing that is different.

As an example, take a software development project where competitive bidding for repeat orders from the same customer is not the norm. In such projects, the customer issues a project charter and expects the IT solution provider to do entire scope planning as shown in the diagram below:

As against that, consider a construction project where tenders are floated. The tender document contains detailed scope and the bidders are expected to provide their bids based on the scope. In such a case, there are actually two projects. The first project is initiated by the customer to plan the scope and the second one is initiated by the construction company to plan the rest of the parts of the project (time, cost etc.) and to carry out the project. This is as shown in the diagram below:

Irrespective of the timing of the scope planning, it is important to know that scope planning needs to happen in its entirety. For the sake of simplicity we shall assume that the scope is being planned as part of the same project after receipt of the project charter so that we can include all the planning activities in the same project. The requirements gathering and scope planning stages described below will still apply to tender based industries with a difference that this would happen as part of two different projects.

Requirements Gathering

Once the project charter has been issued and stakeholders have been identified, the next thing to do is gathering of requirements. Requirements may be gathered either by visiting the customer premises, over emails, over phone, or various other means. This will obviously require project resources. How requirements would be gathered and using which template will all be defined in the project plan.

Requirements document is a very company specific artefact and, hence, would differ from company to company. Below is a template that can be used for capturing requirements. It can be tailored to the need of the company.

Given below is a description of the requirements document template shown above:

Req ID

Requ...