Category Archives: Project Management Body of Knowledge

01 – Foundations of Project Management – PMP, CAPM, PMBOK Training

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Foundations of Project ManagementWelcome to this series on project management, where we’re going through the project management body of knowledge, the PMBOK guide. This is from the project management institute and it’s basically a huge tome of knowledge that’s around 800 pages and it has everything in regards to leading, managing, monitoring and controlling, initiating projects – basically all the way from start to finish.

We’re going to go through all of the different modules in the PMBOK guide and go through them as a course so that you don’t have to necessarily read it all the way through yourself. There’s a lot to get through so let’s get into it.

First of all project management is not new, it’s been around for hundreds of years, thousands of years. As long as things have needed to change or needed to get done project management has been around. Building the Pyramids of Giza is a project, creating the Olympic Games and managing the games and making that happen, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, if you’re thinking about publishing a book that is a project – it has a start and an end date, and it has the scope of the project. What we’re trying to say is that projects are everywhere, from a small renovation to your house to even going and doing the shopping or the grocery shopping all of these things have a start and end date, scope that needs to be completed and requirements for the customer. And that’s the point, they’re trying to get to the outcomes of these projects with a result and leaders and managers applying project management principles which is where the project management body of knowledge comes into it.

What is a project?

A project is a temporary endeavor, so it has a start and an end date, it’s not business as usual and it’s not ongoing. It’s undertaken to create a unique product or an unique service or a unique result, something different. It’s a change.

They’re undertaken to fulfill objectives and they produce what they call deliverables. These deliverables fulfill those project objectives. The objective can be any result, purpose, strategic position in the company, a new product like an iPhone. Projects happen at all levels and they bring about a change, so anywhere there’s change there’s going to be a project to try and make that happen.

Projects Are Temporary

Projects are temporary, and which means they have a beginning and an end. The end of a project is reached for a few different reasons and they can be good, they can be happy reasons, and they can be bad reasons such as when projects end because you have run out of money for example, funding is exhausted or it’s no longer available, there’s no money. Or maybe for a happy reason you’ve met the project objectives. Or maybe it’s been realized that you cannot meet the project objectives, maybe circumstances have changed, maybe the project itself has changed, maybe the need for that project no longer exists and there are many other reasons.

There are regulatory reasons, legal reasons, human resources reasons, and that’s basically where projects come into it – they are temporary but the idea is that when you deliver something it will be long lasting. It will last past the end of the project once the project is finished.

Projects Enable Change and Value Creation

A project is aimed at change, it’s aimed at moving an organization from from one state (which is the current state) and move to a future state.

Projects also enable business value creation. We’re trying to deliver value to our customers, whether our customer is internal to an organization, whether it’s internal to our team, maybe it’s external to our organization where we’re delivering something to our paying customers. There are many different reasons we could be delivering business value. They could also be tangible reasons such as monetary assets, market share, stockholder equity. They could be intangible reasons, not monetary related where it’s just brand goodwill, brand recognition, strategic alignment to a certain certain category or to improve a reputation or many other things that are not monetary related.

Reasons to Initiate Projects

There are many reasons to initiate projects, to start them, to initially kick them off. It could be regulations, it could be to fix or improve a product, it could be to implement or change strategies within an organization or a company, or even within a team or even within yourself sometimes. A personal project to get fit or to get the PMP for example. You could satisfy stakeholder requests or needs if stakeholders or customers are asking for something then that could be a reason to kick off that project and get it started.

There are examples of things that lead to the need of a project – you could have new technology, as the pace of change is really increasing in the world. Which means that there’s always going to be a need for project managers and project roles in the world as well. We’ve got competitive forces, to deliver lower prices than a competitor, political changes, huge large-scale changes around a country, market demand like a customer request, economic changes, stakeholder demands like your customers or people within an organization. There could be a social need for what you’re doing, just general improvements for what you’re doing (for example with your Lean Six Sigma quality improvements). There are many many many different reasons that could be used for initiating a project.

– David McLachlan

04 – Project Process Groups and Tailoring – PMP, CAPM and PMBOK Training

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Projects are Unique

In the PMBOK guide, or the Project Management Body of Knowledge guide, this is one of the greatest things that you will come across and you’ll refer to this all the time when studying for your PMP.

PMBOK Process Groups

This shows us all of the knowledge areas down the left and this is in one point three of the PMBOK guide. Over to the right we’ve got the different process groups. What this means is that the knowledge areas we’ve got, things like Scope, Schedule, Cost, Quality such as testing or making sure that the quality is okay, communicating to our project stakeholders, getting the resources for our project, all of these things will be a part of your project management plan and they’ll be integrated into the project management plan through this overall knowledge area of project integration management.

Then as we’re going along from start to finish over on the right-hand side, we’re initiating a project initially with a Project Charter, identifying our stakeholders, and then we’re planning that project. We’re planning the scope, we’re planning the schedule, planning the cost, planning the quality, and the risks and all of that. Then we’re executing on that plan with our executing process group, monitoring and controlling it to make sure that it doesn’t go off the rails, and we’re keeping it on track. Finally we’re delivering that to the business or our customers and closing that project off, because it is a temporary thing.

There are many different things involved, there are multiple bits of information, there’s multiple ways to manage your project and there’s multiple ways to kick off a project. Multiple reasons to kick off a project, and it all that comes down to the fact that we can tailor a project in many different ways. We can use multiple different different life cycles like Waterfall or Agile. You might have co-located teams or teams all over the country and you’re doing them over Skype or video call or that sort of thing. You might be governed in a different way so you might have a supportive project management office, a controlling or directive project management office. You might have different sponsors who might want daily reports, maybe weekly reports, or maybe they don’t want any reports at all. All of these things just change how we end up managing the project and that makes every project quite unique.

03 – Project Life Cycles and Phase Gates – PMP, CAPM and PMBOK Training

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3_Project Lifecycles and Phase GatesProject Life Cycles and Phase Gates

In order to deliver projects and programs there are many different methods and what we call project life cycles, which are ways of working within a project that we can use to deliver these things.

Predictive Life Cycle

First of all we’ve got our Predictive life cycle, which is traditionally called waterfall, where we think about all the scope and the requirements upfront then we go away for a certain period of time and make it all happen within a project without necessarily getting too much feedback, and then we deliver in one big bang at the end. That’s our predictive lifecycle – we’re predicting all of the things upfront that a customer might want and that might happen in a project.

Iterative Life Cycle

We have our iterative life cycle and incremental life cycle, which actually combine to become Agile in the end. We’re iterating towards a final product but we’re gathering feedback and changing as we go, usually in two to four week cycles or iterations. We’re gathering that feedback, putting it back into our plan, then gathering that feedback again and putting it back into the plan again, but we’re still delivering in one big bang.

Incremental Life Cycle

Incremental is when we’re delivering increments that a customer can see, feel and touch. Based on that they’re actually using that feature in the real world, and then at the end they still get their full final product as well. We do this to get better and more feedback from our customer delivering those features to a customer as we’re going along.

Adaptive Life Cycles

Second to last is adaptive life cycles so these are our Agile agile life cycles and these are usually iterative and incremental. Detailed scope can be defined and approved before the start of each iteration of two to four weeks instead of doing the whole project in a predictive manner – we’re only looking at shorter life cycles. We we don’t need to predict the whole thing and we can change as we’re going along.

Hybrid Life Cycles

Hybrid is just a combination of either predictive or an agile life cycle or an adaptive life cycle where we might have all of our scope upfront but we’re using agile methodologies like Kanban to manage that scope and what should go from “in progress” or the “backlog” to “done”. Or we might be using scrum where we’re having daily stand-ups, just short sharp meetings that give us an update on where everything is up to. These are the combinations that you can have in your project life cycles.

Just as there are multiple different ways of managing a project there are different phase gates we can use as we’re going along. These can be matched up to any of those project life cycles where we’ve got iterations, and each of those iterations or a few different iterations could match up to be one of these phase gates at the end where we are delivering our feasibility study at the beginning for example to see if it’s worth kicking off a project, then we’re delivering our customer requirements (these are just ideas) you might have more phase gates or things that you need to deliver or features that you’d need to deliver as part of your project as you go along. Potentially we’re building all these things, testing them and transitioning them back to the business or back to the operations of the business.

Managing Life Cycles With Project Documents 

That phase gate is the end of a phase and a project’s performance is benchmarked to documents such as the project business case which is up here in the beginning documents. The Project Charter kicks off a project, the project management plan combines all the things like risk, scope, schedule, quality, communications, and stakeholders into one project management plan that you use to monitor and control and execute on the project as you’re going along.

Lastly how do we know that we we’ve met our requirements? It’s the benefits management plan. What are the benefits that we’re delivering and how do we know we’ve met them, or what are we aiming for once this project has been delivered. Is it an increase in customer revenue? Is it an increase in this particular product’s performance? We’re wanting to measure it.

– David McLachlan

02 – The Importance of Project Management – PMP, CAPM and PMBOK Training

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2_Importance of Project ManagementThe Importance of Project Management

This article is about the importance of project management itself, and managing that project in a successful way from beginning to end.

There are benefits to having good project management – effective project management leads to meeting stakeholder objectives, increasing the chances of the project success, resolving problems and issues as they arise (which they always do), responding to risks that might arise, as well as optimizing the use of organizational resources so the people that you’re bringing on board to your project can be used in the absolute best way. Identifying failing projects and sometimes terminating them if you absolutely need to, and managing all of the constraints – money, scope, time frame – all of those need to be managed or shuffled around so you can still meet the project objectives.

Poor project management on the other hand is a different story. I’ve seen this many times and I’m sure you have to, because project management is quite difficult. That’s why it’s nice to have a framework to operate by. You could have missed deadlines where now all of a sudden your project is late. You could have cost overruns where now all of a sudden it’s going to cost two million dollars instead of 1 million dollars or fifty thousand dollars instead of twenty thousand dollars whatever it is.

You could have poor quality – so it’s not actually meeting what the customer wanted. You could be having to rework things to redo them over and over again and the customer is not happy about that. Expansion of scope, otherwise known as scope creep, where the things that the customer wants actually end up being more and more and more and they weren’t designed in the initial project for what we wanted to deliver.

Using a Proven Project Management Framework

There are lots of things that can happen if a project is not managed well, and even when it is managed well. These things can go wrong but that’s the benefit of having a framework to manage it by – you know you’re doing the absolute best you can to try and get these things on the left here (meeting those stakeholder needs, increasing the chances of success) rather than having missed deadlines or cost overruns.

Operations, Projects, Programs, Portfolios

There is a relationship here between three things and we’ve got basically at the very base level, at the operating level where things are done on a day to day basis we’ve got the operations of a business. And that’s where we’ve got shared resources and shared stakeholders, we’re going to have to use these resources and these people from within the organization to help us get the project done, and that’s an essential thing that we need to manage throughout the life of a project.

The next layer from there are our projects, and these are the things that are delivering change to our BAU or operations, but sometimes you want to have a really good overview of all of these multiple projects – there’s lots of projects happening and you need something to clearly define a bunch of those projects in one, and that’s where we come into a program.

Program managers might have a couple of projects, a handful maybe 10 maybe even 20 sometimes where they’ve got multiple projects all delivering the same strategic objective, they’re all delivering a similar thing but doing different things.

Lastly made up of programs and projects and operations are our portfolios. A portfolio manager will have multiple programs and then multiple projects under each of those programs and then lots and lots of BAU teams and operations within the operations side of the business.

– David McLachlan

05 – Project Management Business Documents | PMBOK Course

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Project Management Business Documents

There are many different business documents

There are many different business documents that you’ll need to help kick-off and then manage your project, and we call these Project Management Business Documents that we’re going to need in the managing of our project. There are two main business documents, which are the project business case, and the project benefits management plan. Ultimately the business case will help us kick off the project and start the project but the project management benefits plan will help us manage those benefits that we’re wanting to deliver and make sure that we are delivering on those benefits when the project is delivered. The pre-work we’re looking at is the needs assessment – for example what’s the need of this project? Why is it being kicked off? Why is it being initiated? That helps us and feeds into our business case.

Benefits Management Plan

The project business case also has the benefits management plan within that, so that we know what benefits we’re delivering. All these documents will feed into our project charter which ultimately is one of the first steps, or is the first step in initiating a project. From there the project charter will feed in with all of the information that we’ve gathered from our needs assessment, business case, the risks involved, the stakeholders as an early view of the stakeholders, and risks and scope and schedule that might be involved and all of that feeds into the project management plan on a larger scale where we’re using that now to manage our project on a daily basis.

Project Business Case

So let’s dive into the project business case. What is actually in it? There are a few things usually, and they include business needs – so a description of what is prompting the need for action. Maybe customers have fallen off over the last year and we’re wanting to get more customers, maybe there’s a lot of rework that’s happening in a certain area and we’re wanting to reduce that rework. Whatever the business need is, we’re wanting to include that in the project business case. It’s a feasibility study of why we’re initiating the project. We usually give an analysis of the situation, so what are the facts, what is currently happening, are we currently at 80% capacity but we need to be at a hundred percent capacity? Whatever it is put the raw data and that project management data and info into this analysis of the situation for your business case, and then based on that we’re wanting to give a recommendation.

What’s the need, what’s the current situation, and based on that what are we recommending that people do to make a change and deliver what we need to deliver for this project.

Lastly once we’ve done that of course we’re wanting to see how the benefits that we’re delivering will be measured. Will it be Bob over there in a certain department measuring this for the next two or three months to make sure that things are on track and that it’s actually delivering what we want to deliver? However we’re going to measure it we want to put that in the plan as well.

Project Benefits Management Plan

Which leads us into the project benefits management plan. How are we managing these benefits? We want to usually include what the target benefits are, is it increasing this or decreasing that, include it in the project benefits management plan. We want the time-frame for realizing those benefits – is it a year? Is it six months? Is it one month?

Next, who owns the benefits. This comes back to our BAU, our operations. What are the metrics that we’re measuring, what are the assumptions that we’re making when we’re here measuring these things? We just need to know what those assumptions are in case they end up being wrong, and then we can see why we didn’t meet the the target or maybe we did better than the target (or whatever it is).

Ultimately we want to see what risks there are to meeting those benefits as well and put those in the project benefits management plan.

How to Measure the Project Benefits

There are many different ways to measure these things and measure these benefits and some of these are called out in the project management body of knowledge. They are Net Present Value – you will need to know this for the exam usually they’re fairly straightforward to go into and often the way they’ll word it on the exam will be “you have a net present value of of this and a net present value of that, so which one should you actually choose?” And you choose the highest.

For your Return On Investment we just want the highest return on investment. Internal Rate of Return – we want the higher rate of return as well. The payback period we want a shorter payback period if possible, and the benefit to cost ratio we usually want a higher benefit to a lower cost if possible.

But all of those are just numbers and numerical objectives and financial objectives – usually we can also have things like meeting non-financial objectives, fulfilling contract terms or conditions, meeting governance or regulatory requirements, achieving stakeholder satisfaction, meeting organizational strategy or goals – all these things could be non-monetary benefits that we’re realizing at the end of the project and we can also include.

And those are the project management business documents as part of our foundational elements of project management.