1. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions BASIC DOCUMENTS IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT

2. What is a Project Charter & how to Write a Project Charter The project charter is the document that formally authorizes a project. The project charter provides the project manager with the authority to apply organizational resources to project activities. A project manager is identified and assigned as early in the project as is feasible. The project manager should always be assigned prior to the start of planning (if possible) and preferably while the project charter is being developed. The Project Manager, must get this document (draft) signed off by the stakeholders. A project initiator or sponsor external to the project organization, at a level that is appropriate to funding the project, should issue the project charter. Projects are usually chartered and authorized external to the project organization by an enterprise, a government agency, a company, a program organization, or a portfolio organization, as a result of one or more of the following: GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions The Project Charter

3. A market demand (e.g., a car company authorizing a project to build more fuel-efficient cars in response to gasoline shortages) A business need (e.g., a training company authorizing a project to create a new course to increase its revenues) A customer request (e.g., an electric utility authorizing a project to build a new substation to serve a new industrial park) A technological advance (e.g., an electronics firm authorizing a new project to develop a faster, cheaper, and smaller laptop after advances in computer memory and electronics technology) A legal requirement (e.g., a paint manufacturer authorizing a project to establish guidelines for handling toxic materials) A social need (e.g., a nongovernmental organization in a developing country authorizing a project to provide potable water systems, latrines, and sanitation education to communities suffering from high rates of cholera). GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

4. These stimuli can also be called problems, opportunities, or business requirements. The central theme of all these stimuli is that management must make a decision about how to respond and what projects to authorize and charter. Make sure to have these requirements documented and signed off as they will be used to create the Project Scope Document. Project selection methods involve measuring value or attractiveness to the project owner or sponsor and may include other organizational decision criteria. Project selection also applies to choosing alternative ways of executing the project. Chartering a project links the project to the ongoing work of the organization. In some organizations, a project is not formally chartered and initiated until completion of a needs assessment, feasibility study, preliminary plan, or some other equivalent form of analysis that was separately initiated. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

5. The project charter, either directly, or by reference to other documents, should address the following information: Requirements that satisfy customer, sponsor, and other stakeholder needs, wants and expectations Business needs, high-level project description, or product requirements that the project is undertaken to address Project purpose or justification Assigned Project Manager and authority level Summary milestone schedule Stakeholder influences Functional organizations and their participation Organizational, environmental and external assumptions Organizational, environmental and external constraints Business case justifying the project, including return on investment Summary budget. During subsequent phases of multi-phase projects, the Develop Project Charter process validates the decisions made during the original chartering of the project. If required, it also authorizes the next project phase, and updates the charter. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

6. INPUTS Organizational Process Assets When developing the project charter and subsequent project documentation, any and all of the assets that are used to influence the project’s success can be drawn from organizational process assets. Any and all of the organizations involved in the project can have formal and informal policies, procedures, plans, and guidelines whose effects must be considered. Organizational process assets also represent the organizations’ learning and knowledge from previous projects; for example, completed schedules, risk data, and earned value data. Organizational process assets can be organized differently, depending on the type of industry, organization, and application area. For example, the organizational process assets could be grouped into two categories: · GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

7. Firstly: Organization’s processes and procedures for conducting work:  Organizational standard processes, such as standards, policies (e.g., safety and health policy, and project management policy), standard product and project life cycles, and quality policies and procedures (e.g., process audits, improvement targets, checklists, and standardized process definitions for use in the organization)  Standardized guidelines, work instructions, proposal evaluation criteria, and performance measurement criteria  Templates (e.g., risk templates, work breakdown structure templates, and project schedule network diagram templates)  Guidelines and criteria for tailoring the organization’s set of standard processes to satisfy the specific needs of the project  Organization communication requirements (e.g., specific communication technology available, allowed communication media, record retention, and security requirements) GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

8.  Project closure guidelines or requirements (e.g., final project audits, project evaluations, product validations, and acceptance criteria)  Financial controls procedures (e.g., time reporting, required expenditure and disbursement reviews, accounting codes, and standard contract provisions)  Issue and defect management procedures defining issue and defect controls, issue and defect identification and resolution, and action item tracking  Change control procedures, including the steps by which official company standards, policies, plans, and procedures—or any project documents—will be modified, and how any changes will be approved and validated  Risk control procedures, including risk categories, probability definition and impact, and probability and impact matrix GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

9. Secondly: Procedures for approving and issuing work authorizations. Organizational corporate knowledge base for storing and retrieving information:  Process measurement database used to collect and make available measurement data on processes and products  Project files (e.g., scope, cost, schedule, and quality baselines, performance measurement baselines, project calendars, project schedule network diagrams, risk registers, planned response actions, and defined risk impact)  Historical information and lessons learned knowledge base (e.g., project records and documents, all project closure information and documentation, information about both the results of previous project selection decisions and previous project performance information, and information from the risk management effort) and defect management database containing issue and defect status, control information, issue and defect resolution, and action item results  Configuration management knowledge base containing the versions and baselines of all official company standards, policies, procedures, and any project documents  Financial database containing information such as labor hours, incurred costs, budgets, and any project cost overruns. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

10. Expert Judgment Expert judgment is often used to assess the inputs needed to develop the project charter. You will see this technique used in many of the Project Processes. Such judgment and expertise is applied to any technical and management details during this process. Such expertise is provided by any group or individual with specialized knowledge or training, and is available from many sources, including: Other units within the organization Consultants Stakeholders, including customers or sponsors Professional and technical associations Industry groups. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

11. Enterprise Environmental Factors: When developing the project charter, any and all of the organization’s enterprise environmental factors and systems that surround and influence the project’s success must be considered. This includes items such as, but not limited to: Organizational or company culture and structure Governmental or industry standards (e.g., regulatory agency regulations, product standards, quality standards, and workmanship standards) GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

12. Infrastructure (e.g., existing facilities and capital equipment) Existing human resources (e.g., skills, disciplines, and knowledge, such as design, development, legal, contracting, and purchasing) Personnel administration (e.g., hiring and firing guidelines, employee performance reviews, and training records) Company work authorization system Marketplace conditions Stakeholder risk tolerances Commercial databases (e.g., standardized cost estimating data, industry risk study information, and risk databases) Project management information systems (e.g., an automated tool suite, such as a scheduling software tool, a configuration management system, an information collection and distribution system, or web interfaces to other online automated systems GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

13. The Scope Management Plan: This is a document that defines the Scope of the Project. It is especially important to be thorough and accurate because it feeds into the Requirements document. It is also important that all the Stakeholders buy into it. It should be signed off before going the next step. If the Scope changes it has to go through a change management process and all of the Stakeholders must sign off on it. Schedule Management Plan: The Schedule Management Plan is a component part of the Project Plan that is use in Activity resource planning. The Activity resource plan includes expert judgment, various levels of resource levels or skills, size of machines, tools and make/buy decisions. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

14. Cost Management Plan: Costs will adhere to a prescribed precision based on the scope of the project and may include a contingency amount. Various cost measures or other indicators (e.g. person-days, volume of product). Quality Management Plan: The Quality Management Plan describes how the project team will implement the organization’s quality policy. It must address the quality control, quality management and continuous process improvement for the project. Staffing Management Plan: Identifying project roles, responsibilities and reporting relationships. Obtaining the human resources to complete the project. Improving the competencies and interaction of team members to enhance project performance. Team building plays a big part here. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

15. Communications Plan: Determining the information needs of the stakeholders. Making needed communications available to the stakeholders in a timely manner. Collecting and distributing performance information including status reports, performance reports and forecasting. Risk Management Plan: The Risk Management Plan includes risk identification, risk analysis, risk response planning, monitoring and control. The Procurement Plan: This plan includes what has to be procured, who will provide the estimates, types of contracts to be used, managing multiple providers, constraints and assumptions that could affect the contract and handling make/buy decisions. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

16. A work breakdown structure (WBS) It is very similar to a family tree. It maps out the deliverables of the project, with sub deliverables and activities stemming in a tree format. One of the favorite ways to do the WBS is with yellow post it’s so you can move them around to where they belong. Once It worked on a project where it had to tape together all of the papers that included the post it’s and it was at least 25 pages. This served well when showed management the magnitude of the scope of the project! GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

17. A Work Breakdown Structure is break down the work packages to enable you to roll them back up to a schedule that is complete. A work package is usually no more than 40 hours. The WBS should detail the full scope of work needed to complete the project. Accuracy and completeness are required when composing your WBS. Decomposition is one of the tools you will use when preparing your WBS. You should be able to break down the deliverables to a point where you can easily plan, execute, control and close out the project deliverables. Each work package should be able to be easily estimated in the Activity Definition Process. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

18. You can think of this process in 4 major steps: Step1 Identify all of the major deliverables. The deliverables should be defined according to the way the project is organized. One way is to organize a project in phases. The phases become the first level of decomposition, followed by the deliverables. Step2 involves estimating cost and duration. If that cannot be done, then you have to decompose further until the work package can be estimated. I usually use a work package of 20-40 hours at the most. Not all deliverables will have the same level of decomposition. In any case, a schedule cannot be made until the WBS is complete and has estimates that are as accurate as possible. Step 3 involves identifying components that make up the deliverables. Step 4 is the verification step. You need to determine that each component listed is clear, complete and necessary to fulfill the requirements of the deliverable. Also, you need to easily add up all the estimates, budget and assignments to create a solid schedule. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

19. A WBS looks very much like a flow chart. The goal is to break down the work so that each work package can be assigned to a specific person for accountability and the Project Manager can easily manage the schedule knowing that all parts of the project have been broken down to their smallest part. Each Work package is assigned a unique identifier and these are documented in the WBS dictionary. The dictionary includes a description of the work package, costs, budgets, schedule dates, resource assignments and activity descriptions. This process sounds like a lot of work, but it is a known fact that the more you plan, the better you will be in the end. The WBS plays a major part of Project Management. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

20. Project Scope Management: It is the process of defining what work is required and then making sure that all of the work and only the work is done. This Process includes scope planning, scope definition, creation of the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), scope verification and scope control. Any Project Manager will tell you that “scope creep "is one of the worst problems on a project. That means you must institute a formal Change Control mechanism. All scope must fit the Program’s charter (defined earlier in the process). You should be giving the customer what he asked for; no more, no less. Project manager heard someone once compare it to having a customer order a VW and the engineering team building a Cadillac. Giving away extras is a waste of time and adds to the risk of the project. Maybe it only takes 30 minutes to code; but what about testing, documentation, and training to name a few. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

21. Scope Management involves mastering both product and project scope. Product Scope is another way to say “requirements that relate to the product of the project”. Project scope is the work you need to deliver that product. This includes meetings, reports, analysis and any other project related activities. Scope baseline: Measurements of success on the project include whether the requirements have been met and whether the scope baseline has been met. The scope baseline is the scope statement, the work breakdown structure and the work breakdown structure dictionary. Scope planning is focused on thinking ahead and thinking “how will I do this” before doing the work and the Scope Management Plan. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

22. The Scope Management Plan answers “how will I do scope? What tools should I use to plan how the project will accomplish the scope of this project?” The output of Scope Planning is the Project Scope Management Plan. It should contain 3 parts: how will the scope be planned, executed and controlled? It may be created in iterative steps during project planning. Once complete, it becomes part of the overall Project Plan and cannot be changed without going through a formal Change review process. Once you get to Risk Planning, it is possible that changes will have to be made to the Scope using the formal Change review process. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

23. Scope definition: Scope definition is primarily concerned with what is and is not included in the project. Scope definition takes into account constraints and assumptions. The result is used to manage and measure the project performance. Stakeholder Analysis: This process makes sure the stakeholders’ needs are met and turned into requirements. Product Analysis: This analyzes the objectives stated by the customer or sponsor and turns them into tangible requirements. Project Scope Statement: The preliminary scope statement is expanded into the “final” project scope statement to be used on the project. Different approaches to performing the work and incorporating the needs of the stakeholders are taken into consideration. Scope planning inputs:  Product description  Project Charter  Project constraints  Project assumptions GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions

24. The tools and techniques that may be used are benefit/cost analysis, expert judgment, product analysis and alternatives identification. The main key message here is to have a clearly defined Change Management Plan to address any changes to the final scope. When a change is made, if it is deemed necessary, will cause many other plans and the schedule to be re- done. Changes should be documented as required, important, non-critical or nice to have. GJ Associates for Corporate Training Solutions