Project Management – Week 8 Lecture

Project Management

Project Management

A project is a temporary endeavor, aside from normal business operations, with a goal of developing a particular product, or service, or attaining a desired result. A project has limited resources regarding people, time, and supplies. During project activities, members of the project team are held accountable for the achievement of goals and completion of the project tasks.   A project begins with a planned schedule, a specified outcome, which is its scope, and a planned budget.   The schedule, scope and budget limit the time allotted for project completion, the features and functionality of the final product, and the cost of the project, respectively.   These three limitations are called the triple constraint.

A project manager is a person authorized by a sponsoring organization to oversee a team that will be held accountable for realizing project goals and objectives.   According to the Project management Institute, project management is the application of knowledge skills tools and techniques to product project activities to meet project requirements (Project Management Institute, 2013).  Project managers must not only meet the scope, time, cost, and quality goals, they must also facilitate the entire process.   Project managers must meet the expectations of all stakeholders, those involved in project activities and those affected by a project (Project Management Institute, 2013).

According to the Project Management Institute (2013), “A program is a group of related projects, subproject programs, and program activities managed in a coordinated way to obtain benefits and control not available from managing them individually.”  It is economical to group projects to streamline management, staffing, purchasing and other efforts.  Companies use programs and project portfolio management to ensure that projects are aligned with the enterprise goals.   Program managers often review important information with project managers and coordinate functional groups, suppliers, and operations support staff between projects in a program.
Projects and programs can be grouped and managed as a portfolio of investments that contribute to the entire enterprise’s success.  Portfolio managers help make investment decisions by helping to select and analyze projects from a strategic perspective.  

Figure 6 Project management compared to portfolio management (Schwalbe, 2015)

A portfolio manager addresses questions like, “Are we working on the right projects?” “Are we investing in the right areas?”  “Do we have the right resources to be competitive?”   Before each project begins questions, “Is this project still relevant to the enterprise?” “And, should we go ahead and start on it now, or not?” should be asked by a portfolio manager.   These are strategic questions that a portfolio manager must ask.
A Systems View of Project Management
Projects cannot be run in isolation. Systems that are affected by a project and systems that a project depends on must be considered.  Project managers must take a holistic view of the organization.

Organizations can be better understood by considering different perspectives. Organizations can be viewed from four different frames of reference, structural, human resources, political and symbolic.

 

 

 

Figure 1 Perspectives on Organizations (Schwalbe, 2015)

There are three basic classifications of organizational structures, functional, project, and matrix. Some companies use a combination of these organizational structures or just one of them. 

Traditional phases of a project lifecycle are concept, development, implementation, and closeout.

Figure 3 Phases of the traditional project life cycle (Schwalbe, 2015)
Project Management Process Groups
A process is a sequence of activities aimed towards a particular outcome.  Project management involves the effecting of several associated processes.  Project management process groups consist of the following processes, initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing.

1. The executing process consumes most of the project schedule.  Figure 1 depicts the percentage of time spent on each process group.

Figure 1 Percentage of Time Spent on Each Process Group(Schwalbe, 2015)
Mapping the Process Groups to the Knowledge Areas
The PMBOK® Guide, Fifth Edition, 2013 can be used to map the key project management process group activities to the ten knowledge areas.  Activities from each knowledge area can be categorized into project manage process groups.  See Table 1.

Table 1  Mapping Project Management Process Groups to Knowledge Areas (Schwalbe, 2015)

Project Scope Management

1. Planning scope is deciding on how the project’s scope and requirements will be managed.
2. Requirements collection is documenting the descriptions of the features and functions of the products produced during the project
3. Defining scope is creating a scope statement by reviewing the business case, project charter, and requirements documents
4. Creating the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is planning tasks to complete towards delivery of each major project deliverable, by splitting the tasks into manageable tasks and subtasks
5. Validating scope is formalizing acceptance of the project deliverables by the customer validating that the product contains all features specified in the requirements documentation.
6. Controlling scope is documenting and overseeing changes to project scope throughout the life of the project.  The aim is for scope changes not to increase the project cost or schedule.

Project Stakeholder Management
Identifying stakeholders involves identifying every person relevant to a project or affected by it and establishing the best ways to manage relationships with them.  Planning stakeholder management is creating effective strategies to engage stakeholders.  Managing stakeholder engagement is fostering engagement with project stakeholders to complete project activities and fulfill project goals.  Controlling stakeholder engagement is observing stakeholder relationships and fine-tuning plans and approaches for involving stakeholder.
Project Communications Management
Planning communications management is deciding stakeholder communication needs, what communication media should be used, what information should be communicated, and how often.  Managing communications involves following a communications management plan to create, distribute, store, retrieve, and dispose of project communications.  Controlling communications involves observing and directing project communications to confirm that stakeholder communication needs are fulfilled.

Project Time Management

1. Project time management is often cited as the main source of conflict on projects, and most IT projects exceed time estimates
2. Main processes include
1. Plan schedule management
2. Define activities
3. Sequence activities
4. Estimate activity resources
5. Estimate activity durations
6. Develop schedule
7. Control schedule

Project Quality
Project quality management ensures that the project outcome satisfies the business goals and other purposes for which the project was undertaken.  Project quality management includes three processes planning quality management, performing quality assurance, and performing quality control. Planning quality management involves identifying standards relevant to the project, defining how to meet the standards, and determining how to measure whether the standards were achieved.  Performing quality assurance involves evaluating the overall project performance periodically to ensure the project satisfies quality standards. Performing quality control entails monitoring project results to ensure compliance with quality standards.

 

Planning Quality
Planning quality management prevents defects by setting quality standards, procedures to achieve the standards and methods to verify that the standards were achieved.  Quality planning requires anticipation of situations that might impact quality and preparing ways to address them.   
Performing Quality Assurance
Quality assurance consists of all the undertakings related to satisfying the project quality standards.  Continuous quality improvement, Kaizen, a Japanese philosophy for improvement, is an additional goal of quality assurance.  Lean is another quality assurance concept that involves processes to minimize waste while maximizing customer value.  Benchmarking compares specific project practices and product features to other projects and products and uses results for quality improvements.  A quality audit reviews quality management pursuits for improvements and lessons learned.
Controlling Quality

Quality acceptance or rejection decisions, rework, and process adjustments are the main outputs of quality control.  The Seven Basic Tools of Quality are, cause and effect diagrams, quality control charts, checksheets, scatter diagrams, histograms, Pareto charts, and flowcharts.

 

 

If you have any questions about this lecture, feel free to ask them in the 'Ask the Professor' discussion found in Week 1