Project Management Guide PDF

Introduction to Project Management What is a Project? ===================================================== Project Attributes ================== - ***A project has a unique purpose:*** Every project should have a well- defined objective. For example, Anne, the Project Management Office...

Introduction to Project Management What is a Project? ===================================================== Project Attributes ================== - ***A project has a unique purpose:*** Every project should have a well- defined objective. For example, Anne, the Project Management Office director, might sponsor an IT collaboration project to develop a list and initial analysis of potential IT projects that might improve operations for the company. The unique purpose of this project would be to create a collaborative report with ideas from people throughout the company. The results would provide the basis for further discussions and selecting projects to implement. In this example, the projects result in a unique product, service, or result. - ***A project is temporary:*** A project has a definite beginning and end. In the IT collaboration project, Anne might form a team of people to work immediately on the project and then expect a report and an executive presentation of the results in one month. - ***A project drives change and enables value creation:*** A project is initiated to bring about a change to meet a need or desire. Its purpose is to achieve a specific objective that changes the context from a current state to a more desired or valued future state. - ***A project is developed using progressive elaboration:*** Projects are often broadly defined when they begin, and as time passes, the specific details of the project become clearer. Therefore, projects should be developed in increments. A project team should develop initial plans and then update them with more detail based on new information. - ***A project requires resources, often from various areas:*** Resources include people, hardware, software, and other assets. Many projects cross departmental or other boundaries to achieve their unique purposes. For the IT collaboration project, people from IT, marketing, sales, distribution, and other areas of the company would need to work together to develop ideas. - ***A project should have a primary customer or sponsor:*** Most projects have many interested parties or stakeholders, but for a project to succeed, someone must take the primary role of sponsorship. The **project sponsor** usually provides the direction and funding for the project. Anne would be the sponsor for the IT collaboration project. - ***A project involves uncertainty:*** Because every project is unique, it is sometimes difficult to define its objectives clearly, estimate how long it will take to complete, or determine how much it will cost. External factors also cause uncertainty, such as a supplier going out of business or a project team member needing unplanned time off. This uncertainty is one of the main reasons project management is so challenging, especially on projects involving new technologies. What is Project Management? =========================== Project Stakeholders ==================== Project Management Knowledge Areas ================================== - **Project Scope Management** -- It involves defining and managing all the work required to complete the project successfully. - **Project Schedule Management** -- This is formerly called project time management; includes estimating how long it will take to complete the work, developing an acceptable project schedule, and ensuring timely completion of the project. - **Project Cost Management** -- It consists of preparing and managing the budget for the project. - **Project Quality Management** -- It ensures that the project will satisfy the stated or implied needs for which it was undertaken. - **Project Resource Management** -- This is concerned with making effective use of the people and physical resources involved with the project. - **Project Communications Management --** It involves generating, collecting, disseminating, and storing project information. - **Project Risk Management --** It includes identifying, analyzing, and responding to risks related to the project. - **Project Procurement Management --** It involves acquiring or procuring goods and services for a project from outside the performing organization. - **Project Stakeholder Management --** It includes identifying and analyzing stakeholder needs while managing and controlling their engagement throughout the life of the project. - **Project Integration Management** -- It is an overarching function that affects and is affected by all other knowledge areas. It is the umbrella that covers all other project management knowledge areas. It knits together individual processes and tasks into one project with defined goals and deliverables. Project Management Tools and Techniques ======================================= Project Management Techniques ============================= - **Classic Technique** -- This includes preparing a plan of upcoming work, estimating tasks to perform, allocating resources, providing and getting feedback from the team, and monitoring quality and deadlines. This technique is ideal for running projects performed by small teams when it's not really necessary to implement a complex process. - **Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)** -- It is a way to organize the work into smaller, more manageable pieces. It transforms big project activities into chunks of manageable tasks that the team can easily understand and complete. It will help you understand all the tasks and resources that go into producing the final deliverable. This process continues until the team reaches a point where the task can be accomplished, who will get that assignment. - **Waterfall Technique --** It is based on the project management tasks to be dealt with in a properly sequential form where the next task is only performed and performed well when the previous task has been completed. Just like a waterfall, the tasks flow to the desired direction smoothly, but only if they are completed in a sequential form. If you use this project management technique, activities and tasks will linearly flow through five (5) phases: - **Requirements --** get all the necessary documents - **Design --** use a WBS to create a list of tasks - **Implementation --** complete tasks - **Verification --** review the deliverables - **Maintenance/Deployment --** maintain and modify if necessary - **Gantt Chart** -- This is a standard format for displaying project schedule information by listing project activities and their corresponding start and finish dates in calendar form. It's a visual representation of all the tasks your team has to complete to wrap up the project, visualized together with time spans. Making a Gantt chart is a technique, but it can be combined with a Gantt chart tool to make that technique much easier to execute. - **Agile Project Management** -- It is a set of principles based on the value-centered approach. It prescribes dividing project work into short sprints, using adaptive planning and continual improvement , and fostering teams' self-organization and collaboration targeted to produce maximum value. Agile is used in software development projects that involve frequent iterations and are performed by small and highly collaborative teams. - **Rational Unified Process (RUP)** -- This is a framework designed for software development teams and projects. It prescribes implementing an iterative development process, where feedback from product users is considered for planning future development phases. RUP technique is applied in software development projects, where end-user satisfaction is the key requirement. - **Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT)** -- It involves complex and detailed planning and visual tracking of work results on PERT charts. It helps the team to keep track of all of their developmental activities and fix their weaknesses. This technique suits best for large and long-term projects with non-routine tasks and challenging requirements. - **Critical Path Technique** -- It involves detecting the longest path (sequence of tasks) from the beginning to the end of a project and defining the critical tasks. Critical are tasks that influence the deadlines of the entire project and require closer attention and thorough control. Critical path technique is used for complex projects where delivery terms and deadlines are critical, in such areas as construction, defense, software development, and others. - **Critical Chain Technique** -- This is a more innovative technique that derives from PERT and Critical Path methods. It is less focused on rigid task order and scheduling and prescribes more flexibility in resource allocation and more attention to how time is used. This technique emphasizes prioritization, dependencies analysis, and optimization of time expenses. Like the previous two techniques, it is used in complex projects. As it is focused on time optimization - **Extreme Project Management (XPM)** -- It emphasizes elasticity in Project Management Tools ======================== - **Data Gathering** -- It includes benchmarking, brainstorming, check sheets, checklists, focus groups, interviews, market research, questionnaires and surveys, and statistical sampling. - **Data Analysis** -- It includes alternatives analysis, assessment of other risk parameters, assumption and constraint analysis, cost of quality, cost-benefit analysis, decision tree analysis, document analysis, and earned value analysis. - **Data Representation** -- It includes affinity diagrams, cause-and- effect diagrams, control charts, flow charts, hierarchical charts, histograms, logical data models, matrix diagrams, matrix-based charts, mind mapping, probability and impact matrix, scatter diagrams, stakeholder engagement assessment matrix, stakeholder mapping/representation, and text-oriented formats. - **Decision Making** -- It determines which activities are most important or critical for the project's success. Some of the examples include multi-criteria decision analysis and voting. - **Communication**: Communication within a project team needs to be properly organized, being the key point in many techniques and methodologies. Examples are feedback and presentations. - **Interpersonal and Team Skills** -- It includes active listening, communication styles assessment, conflict management, cultural awareness, decision making, emotional intelligence, facilitation, influencing, leadership, meeting management, motivation, negotiation, networking, nominal group, political awareness, and team building. Project Successes and Project Failures Project Success Factors ============================================================== - **Intelligent People:** To make a project a success, you need capable people in your team. A project can derail at any point in time. For this, the project staff and all the project stakeholders must share their enthusiasm and commitment with the group. The team should share similar visions for the project and aim for success. It is important to assign the right people to each aspect of the project and make sure they are working well together. - **Comprehensive Planning** -- This sets up a project for success from the start. All stakeholders should be on board during the planning process and always know in which direction the project is going to go. Planning can help the team to meet deadlines and stay organized. Good planning not only keeps the project team focused and on track but also keeps stakeholders aware of project progress. - **Open Communication:** Looking closely at details and listening to outside sources of information is vital to the success of a project. When the team is working on a specific schedule, it is important that the team remains well-informed in every aspect of the project. Good communication also includes knowing when to say no. A project team should never promise anything they know they can't deliver. Always be honest about what your team can do and when it can be done by. - **Careful Risk Management:** It is vital to produce a risk log with an action plan for the risks that the project could face. Make sure all key stakeholders are aware of your risk log and know where they can find it. If something happens, then the team can quickly resolve the issue with the management plan that has already been set in place. This will give the team confidence when facing project risks and help the clients feel comfortable with the project's progression. - **Strong Project Closure:** If a project does not have strong closure, then it has the potential to continue to consume resources. The project team must be firm and agree with the customer that all critical success factors have been met. Confirmation of the project delivery, testing, and release must be agreed upon and signed off. Satisfaction surveys are good forms of documentation to log and file for future reference and valuable information for future use. Main Causes of Project Failures =============================== - **Failure to Plan Effectively:** Effective planning is a project management success factor that simply can't be overlook ed. Effective project planning involves writing out your plan, setting a realistic time frame, estimating costs, determining milestones, documenting deliverables, and defining project scope. One way to help you plan effectively is to utilize a project management platform to keep you organized. - **Disregarding Risk Management:** We all know that projects don't go as planned and regularly fail. Create a risk log with an action plan and keep it in a location where your team members and stakeholders can access it. This will allow your team members to easily find information. Having a solid risk management plan in place will also allow you to take immediate action if you see the warning signs of failure headed your way. - **Inadequate Scope Document:** An inadequate scope document, or complete lack of a scope document, is a huge project failure factor. Ultimately, defining your project's scope should be accomplished during the planning and goal setting stage of your project with a scope document. Defining how you will handle scope changes and how you will track them will help keep everyone on the same page when things inevitably change. - **Not Selecting the Right People:** Assign team members to roles where they will excel and use your central resources to help keep everyone on the same page while you and your team pursue your project to completion. Projects can experience difficulty or setbacks at any time, and if your team is not structured effectively , it will make your role as project manager significantly harder. - **Lack of Communication:** Poor communication leads to disaster and is a major project failure factor. If you have struggled with communication on your teams in the past, be sure to implement a communication plan when you create your project plan to avoid issues from the start. Find a communication channel that works well for your team and stakeholders, and record past communications and errors so you can avoid them in the future. Don't let your project fall apart simply because you failed to communicate effectively. - **No Management Support:** Projects that fail to have the support of management may never get approved, and even if they do, with little management support, the project is much more likely to fail. This project failure factor is often caused by unclear project goals and a failure to define the value it adds or the problem it solves for the business. If you can't define the value your project brings, it will be difficult to get sufficient funds allocated to the project. - **Weak Project Closure:** Projects are not meant to drag on forever, and they will drain your resources if you don't establish a set of parameters for project closure. Finalizing a project involves establishing an agreement with your clients that you met the critical success factors for the project and the project has been delivered, tested, and released according to client satisfaction. You might even ask your clients to complete a satisfaction survey to get feedback and help finalize the project further.