The reason for project management is to generate better data for decision making, and manage resources.
Establish the organization :- Define the objective. Clarity of the project is very important.
Identify Project manager, its responsibilities, and authorities.
Get the team information , their names, expertise, their responsibilities, make sure they understand PM..
Gather information about the project sponsors and organizational chart.
Define the parameters :- Scope of the project, Project deadlines, Identify resources, Short-clear project objective statement, Output of the project, Major deliverables with target dates.
Plan the Framework :- Many meetings and lack of making quick decision can be demoralizing team.
Discuss and agree on Meeting schedule, Have team members log all issues and make sure that these issues are being addressed, Team has access to accepted communication media.
Assemble the project definition document(PDD) :-
Develop the work breakdown structure:- Identify all the tasks including planning, approval and testing, Have single owner per task, define time units in Hours/Days/Weeks.
Develop Schedule:- Sequence the schedule tasks, and allocate time required to meet the objective.
Create schedule by defining logical relationship between tasks(called dependencies) and estimated time for each task.
Logical relationship represented by PERT, Network Diagram, Dependencies and Logical Diagrams are sequence (flow) of work in the project. Logical leadership are the sequence(flow) of work in project. The common relationships are
Finish-Start (F-S) :- Dependent task can be started only after completing the previous task.
Start-Start (S-S) :- Work can be done in parallel, however the work cannot begin on one task unless the work has begun on another. Once begun, both tasks can proceed in parallel.
Start-Start with lags :- There is delay between the start of tasks. Due to the ambiguity of delay, it is a good idea to break task into smaller tasks and follow F-S model.
Milestone is a point in time and is typically used for important event and to focus management attention on them.
It is also important because many dependent processes are awaiting to start.
Gantt Chart: A schedule is created by duplicating dependency diagram with estimated task length. This can be created by Project mgmt software.
Analyze Resources :- It provides better understanding of resources. Adding more resources does not mean to expedite the process. It checks whether any resource is underutilized, any resource is affected by parallel work, any resources are available, does the task owner has skill to perform the work.
The Gant Chart with owner assigned is a basic tool for resource analysis.
Optimize tradeoffs:- This means making project more efficient. Sometime it is necessary to give up something desired in order to achieve an optimum result. You can reduce the scope, change the sequence, reassign or obtain more resources.
Develop Risk Management plans:- Identify risks to the project, make sure someone is responsible to mange the risk if occur, prioritize risks and reduce probability of occurring the risk.
It has two component Risk assessment and Risk management.
Risk assessment :- Team brainstorms and identifies 2-3 risks that has greatest threat to the project and develop a plan to manage them.
Risk management :- Plans should address both actions that can be taken to reduce the probability of risk occur and actions that can be taken if the risk occurs. Contingency plan must be communicated and invoke if necessary (Reduce scope of the project)
Staying on track is more important than developing the initial project plan. The purpose of these steps is to focus project managers and team attention on the areas that provide project progress information. this enable the team to take dynamic decisions.
Collect status, Plan & take adaptive action :- Collect information on Schedule status, open issues, and risks.
It checks whether the schedule task started/finished on time, if not address the issues. Check the status of all open items. Check the status of the known risk and look for any unknown risks. The result of this is eliminating few tasks, change the dependencies, change the resources, accept new parameters, develop new way to perform the same task.
Close out the project :- This is use for future performance.
It analyze what aspect of PM is more effective, what might be improved, learning is recorded and can be used in future projects, acknowledge and celebrate.
