Project Management

Project Management refers to the process of getting the project completion within the available resources and designated timeframe effectively and efficiently. Project management is an application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities in order to meet project requirements. Project management really began to emerge as a profession more than 50 years ago.

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), there are five phases of project management – initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and closing.

Project Charter and Plan

Project charter is a statement of objectives of a project which also sets out detailed project goals, roles and responsibilities. It also identifies the main stakeholders. Project charter henceforth consists of the problem statement for which the project is initiated, the purpose outlining the goals to be achieved by the project, the scope of the project on enlisting the resource requirement and the results to achieve in quantifiable terms. Project charter also contains the likely benefits to the stakeholders for taking up the project and justifies the feasibility for same.

A project charter includes a number of key elements. The first of these is a clear problem statement. Being clear about what it is you’re trying to solve and getting back to that. There needs to be a clear goal statement or a purpose statement to guide the team. You need to define and be clear about the tangible and measureable deliverables you’re looking for out of the process.

You also need to define and understand the resources required to complete the project successfully. These resources include people, financing, equipment, software, and research. Finally, the project charter identifies the important roles and responsibilities that need to be filled in order for the project to succeed. These roles include sponsors, process owners, project managers, and team members.

The problem statement describes the problem that needs to be solved, or the big result you’re after. The problem statement also describes the impact this problem has on the organization. It may include a background statement or background data. It could also describe, at a high level, what success looks like for the organization.

Key deliverables provide a roadmap, or a sequence of tasks that need to be accomplished to complete the project on time. This would include completion dates and important milestones that you’re going to work toward. These are usually aligned with the various phases of a project – for example, DMAIC; the plan, do, check, act approach; or initiating, planning, execution, monitoring, and closing.

Defining resources, roles, and responsibilities starts with specifying the people who are going to be involved and how long their involvement will be. It’s important that team roles and responsibilities are clearly defined. To help with this process, you can use a responsible, accountable, consulted, and involved, or RACI, chart for any given step in the process.

A goal statement describes the anticipated results for the project. In other words, what does success look like and how might we measure that? The goal statement outlines the quality focus and may include metrics related to issues such as safety, quality, delivery, cost, morale, and productivity. One of the important things that you should to do when setting goals is to think about being SMART or specific, measurable, agreed-upon, realistic and time-framed.

Stakeholder Management

Stakeholders are people with a vested interest in your project. Primary stakeholders can be suppliers, sponsors, your customers, and anybody else that is directly involved. You can also think about this as an end-to-end value stream and these are all the people that come into play throughout the process. You also have secondary stakeholders. This could be people in accounting, engineering, sales and marketing, human relations, the quality organization, and the supply chain. They can all have a stake in a project from the perspective that they can support it. They need to be involved or they’re going to need to do something differently as a result of this project.

Identifying stakeholders often starts with a brainstorming session. This involves sitting down with the team and making a list of everybody you think could be an important stakeholder. An important technique for this is the SIPOC, or suppliers, inputs, process, outputs, and customers, diagram. SIPOC also sometimes includes requirements. SIPOC is a very powerful tool you can use to make sure you’ve captured all your stakeholders.

Stakeholder management is critical for the success of any project. The factors you need to consider include the level of interest and degree of potential impact. The stakeholder matrix is a diagram that you can use to determine the level of power and interest stakeholders have in a project. The matrix is affected by two factors – the power individuals have over the success or failure of this project and the level of interest they have. These two factors are measured from low to high.

The matrix consists of four quadrants. On the left is an arrow labeled Power, from low to high. Below the diagram is an arrow labeled Interest pointing from left to right, and low to high. The stakeholders are placed in a quadrant depending on their level of interest and level of power. How much interest and power these stakeholders have will influence how you expend your energy in managing their attitudes, how you communicate, how you engage, and how you collaborate with them to drive project success.

Project Plan

Project plan development involves setting up timelines and milestones to achieve as the project processes. It acts as the basis on which resource requirements are computed. Various project planning tools are used for the purpose like Gantt charts, CPM/PERT charts, project schedules, etc.

Project Risk Analysis is conducted during project planning to work out feasibility of the project as well develop counter-measures to mitigate risks involved and their impact. Usually aspects of project which are analyzed are safety, reliability, serviceability, etc. Risk analysis involves identification and mitigation of risks. Various analysis tools are used like

1. SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) Matrix – It involves a scan of the internal and external environment to classify internal as strengths (S) or weaknesses (W), and those external to the firm can be classified as opportunities (O) or threats (T).
2. Risk Priority Number – Risk Priority Number (RPN) is a measure risk by assigning the RPN values range from 1 (absolute best) to 1000 (absolute worst) to identify critical failure modes with project.
3. Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) – It identifies failures in a project by studying the impact of all possible failures which are prioritized according to severity, frequency and identification.

Risk mitigation involves continuous review of risk identification and mitigation plans as during project progress environmental changes and new risk are identified if any step changes mid-way thus, a risk management system is embedded during project planning.

Project communication plan

An important aspect of a project charter is the project communication plan. This plan is used to describe the communications that have to happen for the project and how they will be planned, structured, monitored, and controlled.

The project communication plan gives people information about what’s planned, who it’s going to affect, and so on. It communicates clearly about the work breakdown structure, the methods to be used to disseminate information about the work to be done, and, importantly, who’s going to be involved. It also addresses how to monitor and control communications as a project proceeds. There are three main communication methods – written, voice and meetings.

Project Scope

After defining the project charter and planning, the project scope is finalized thus, defining the resource requirement and listing the affected departments during the project execution. Project managers utilize various tools during this step like SIPOC, Pareto charts, brainstorming, etc to defining and documenting the project scope.

The project scope defines the baseline and helps set stakeholder expectations about what’s included in the project and what’s going to be left out. From there, it becomes possible to understand what impact the project is expected to have on the problem and the organization.

A scope that is too broad can cause the following problems:

1. cause the source of the problem to be overlooked
2. impact project completion
3. overwhelm and frustrate the project team

Scope creep happens when a series of out-of-scope actions occur in a project. A project can easily go out of scope, and this can seriously damage your project’s potential for success. Scope creep can occur when a team realizes that the problem being addressed is more serious than first thought – and attempts to solve all the associated problems instead of just the one it should be solving. Scope creep can also occur when the project champion encourages the team to do this. The project scope should establish what the project involves and what it can achieve. A well-scoped project does the following:

1. addresses the source of the problem
2. has achievable objectives
3. has time, money, and capability available to match the objectives
4. has consistent input from stakeholders

If a project has been properly scoped, you should be able to answer the following questions when the project is finished:

1. What’s the defect?
2. What’s the procedure to ensure quality?
3. What are our improvement goals?
4. How much improvement have we made in the last six months?
5. How much effort is given to this problem?
6. How much does this problem cost the organization?

Determining the scope of a project does not mean that you or your project team can completely prevent changes to the project further down the line. But it can help you to increase the project’s chances of being successful.

Setting project scope is an important step in creating the project charter. Tools that you can use to scope a project include process maps and Pareto charts. Scoping that is too narrow or too broad can affect a project’s achievement of Six Sigma goals. A well-scoped project addresses the source of the problem; has achievable objectives; has time, money, and capability available to match the objectives; and has consistent input from stakeholders. When scoping a project, you should find out what other projects impact it, set clear expectations, focus on the financial aspects of the project, prevent the project crossing boundaries, be time conscious, and aim to write a precise and concise scope statement.

Customers

It’s important to understand and know who a customer is. Customers can be divided into two groups: external and internal customers. External customers are from outside of the organization and buy the product or service you provide. External customers fall into different kinds of groups. You have the final buyers of products and services. You also have what’s called a business-to-business relationship where businesses sell to other businesses. Internal customers are people within the organization and can be thought of as process customers. They are important and have an impact on each other. For example, if you make a product or service available to external customers, that product or service is created by your internal customers.

Project Metrics

They are the essential component of project management which shows the status of the project. Their selection and updation is necessary for proper monitoring of the project’s progress. Project metrics are tactical and used by project manager to adapt project work flow and technical activities i.e. guide adjustments to work schedule to avoid delays and assess product quality on an ongoing basis. Project metrics usually applied measure consumption of time, budget, other resources and quality of output.

Project Documentation

It involves documenting all objectives, milestones, activities, process and blueprints of the project or in short all documents from project being conceived to implementation so as to provide accurate measure of project success. Large projects need more detailed documentation to cover all aspects of the project. Various graphical tools and techniques are used like state mapping, storyboard and six sigma projects implement DMAIC methodology thus documentation is done accordingly with figures and charts showing activity at that stage.

Project Closure

It is the last phase of project which confirms achievement of laid objectives for the project with completion of required documentation. It also involves discussion with project sponsors for project completion agreement which involves comparison with the project charter.