Phases In Project Management : Phase II — PLANNING

A. Uses of planning

To direct the peo­ple who are workingHelps track how the project is goingGives you an indi­ca­tion on when to cor­rect course when neededDirects how com­mu­ni­ca­tion flows; with team mem­bers and management

B. Iden­ti­fy­ing the work to be done

Here, you’ll have to be intro­duced to what’s called WBS.

WBS :  WORK BREAKDOWN STRUCTURE

This is used as a tool to Plan — track and man­age a project

How use­ful is WBS?

Helps esti­mate time and smaller chunks of workMakes it eas­ier to assign work to team membersBuild check points in your project that allows you to mea­sure progress

There are TWO main tasks involved in the WBS

Sum­mary task; The higher level tasks that sum­ma­rize the project. These lev­els depend on the size of the project.Work pack­ages; Which are low­est level tasks

C.  How to build a WBS

The best way is to start from the top lev­els (Sum­mary task) and work your way down to the bottom.Iden­tify lev­els of sum­mary tasks. This can be done by break­ing work groups down.Begin with the Scope state­ments and Deliv­er­ables.

Trade Show WBS

Note: You will have to break down work to match the fre­quency of sta­tus reports

Gen­er­ally, most man­agers shoot for work pack­ages that use 8–80 hours to finish

D. How can you test to ver­ify if you used the right break­down structure

You will have to answer these very sim­ple ques­tions, and only then would you be able to tell if you did a great job break­ing down your work structures.

Is time and cost easy to calculate?Is the sta­tus easy to mea­sure at all times?Are tasks dura­tion shorter than what is actu­ally being reported?

It’s also very impor­tant to note that some parts of the work might need to be bro­ken into three parts because of more work, but oth­ers may need only two steps.

E. Defin­ing Work packages

To make sure your team knows what to do, cre­ate work pack­age doc­u­ments that describe work iden­ti­fied in the WBS in detail.

Details include:

How famil­iar the work isThe expe­ri­ence of the per­son to whom the task is assignedIf work is unfa­mil­iar, the man­ager should turn to team leaders

The SCHEDULE

Here is the place in the project’s life time that will tell you how long the project will last and when you will need the peo­ple for the work.

The WBS iden­ti­fies the work peo­ple have to do in the project but it does not tell you how long the work will take.

Do these:

I. Turn the Tasks into schedule

The tasks should be placed in the right sequence order.Spec­ify which task fin­ish first before start­ing new ones.Note which ones start and fin­ish at the same time.

II. Spec­ify Dependencies

Esti­mate the time that each task will takeIden­tify peo­ple on your project team and assign them to task.

To know the task dura­tion, esti­mate hours and the num­ber of peo­ple to do the work

Take into account other con­straints such as dead­lines.

F. RESOURCES

The man­ager should under­stand everybody’s role and respon­si­bil­ity on the project.Team mem­bers should know the chain of com­mand and under­stand their roles

Under­stand­ing the roles of peo­ple on the project

1.The best tool to use is called Respon­si­bil­ity Matrix.

This has FOUR cat­e­gories of responsibilities;

r = Group respon­si­ble for doing the worki = Informed, mean­ing this group needs to be informedc = Con­sult a team about deci­sions, but this group is not account­able for decisionsa = This group is held account­able for deci­sions made as they approve and del­e­gate work.

2. Review the respon­si­bil­ity matrix before start­ing work. Make sure to resolve any issues.

3. Cre­ate project orga­ni­za­tion chart

Chart Iden­ti­fies the chain of com­mand in case you need to address an issue to some one, you’ll know exactly who that some­one is.It shows hierarchy.

4. Iden­tify the type and num­ber of skilled work­ers the project requires.

Build Skills Matrix

G. Project Budget

Total cost is very impor­tant. Projects boil down to money. As a project man­ager, you esti­mate total project cost by cal­cu­lat­ing the cost to com­plete  all work.

You’ll have to present it to man­age­ment  and they’ll approve or not. Man­age­ment can pro­vide you with a tar­get bud­get and then you’ll work within that.

You’ll have to let employees’s salary be taken care of by HR — this cost is called Bur­den cost.Include time-based cost into total project cost. For example;

Rental equip­ment costOffice lease cost

Include Mate­r­ial cost. eg; Papers to print sales, toner, misc.Include ancil­lary cost for exam­ple travel cost, train­ing cost, reg­is­tra­tion fees

H. Risk Man­age­ment Plan

This tool is used to plan for risks that can be encoun­tered.  To build a risk man­age­ment plan first you must iden­tify the prob­lems that a project may face. There are two types of risks knowns and unknowns.

Knowns

Team mem­bers liv­ing apartMis-communicationTime zone differenceLack of details (for exam­ple, spe­cific deliverables)Lim­ited options (for exam­ple, peo­ple with skills that are hard to find)

Uknowns

Can­celled flights or shipmentsTech­nol­ogy may fail and may cost more that expectedCon­tin­gency funds (for exam­ple, this can be avoided by hav­ing an insur­ance policy)

Design and fill out a risk infor­ma­tion sheet and doc­u­ment the spec­i­fi­ca­tion of the risks.

I. Assess­ing Risks

There are two questions.

1. What is the like­li­hood that a risk will occur?

2. How big is the impact if it does occur?

A. After assess­ing the risks pri­or­i­tize them and decide which one to manage.

B. Decide how to respond to each risk in a plan by:

Accept­ing consequencesUsing con­tin­gency fundsAvoid risks — remove from project scopeMit­i­gate — change project scope or reduce the risk consequencesTrans­fer the risks

C. Define how to mon­i­tor risks and mea­sure responses by cre­at­ing a risk log.

J. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Plan

Iden­tify the audi­ence from the respon­si­bil­ity metricsDefine what the audi­ence needs to knowAs a project is under­way com­mu­ni­cate its progress

Respon­si­bil­ity Matrix Table

H. Qual­ity Man­age­ment Plan

What is Qual­ity? You must meet the clients requirements.

on timewithin bud­get

The qual­ity man­age­ment plan has three processes.

QUALITY MGT PLAN DIAGRAM

Define qual­ity assur­ance plan (for exam­ple, 3 eggs out of 1,000 eggs have to be okay)Inspec­tion: This is done by peer reviews and walk-thrus

TOOLS FOR QUALITY IMPROVEMENT

The cause and effect dia­gram also known as the fish bone dia­gram will help to identify

fac­tors that can lead to problem.

Fish­bone OR Cause and Effect Diagram

I. Change Management

Ask your­self; What items do I want to control?

For exam­ple; Project Scope require­ments or project plan !

The ver­sions that you con­trol are called Base­line Doc­u­ments.

Change Man­age­ment Document

You will need  two things from here:

A change review board, made up of core project people You must intro­duce a change request form

J. Esti­mat­ing …………………………………………………………………………….Will Con­tinue soon