Project Management

Project Management

Project Management Overview

Project Documents

ProjectManagementDoc.com provide a excellent set of document templates for project managment. These template follow the PMBOK (Project Management Book of Knowledge) strategy and are designed for use with large projects. You should familiarize yourself with all of the document templates. For this project, you will need only a few documents.

Project Management Planning

Download the Project Management Plan, which can be found at:

Notes for the Project Managment Plan

  • Introduction
    • The Introduction provides a high level overview of the project and what is included in this Project Management Plan. This should include a high level description of the project and describe the projects deliverables and benefits. Excessive detail is not necessary.
    • Customer Questions:
      • Current state of business affairs
      • Explanation of events leading to the need for the project
      • Description of the new opportunity that requires the project
      • Other information needed to understand the purpose of the project
  • Project Management Approach
    • This section should describe, in general terms, the roles and authority of project team members. It should also include which organizations will provide resources for the project and any resource constraints or limitations. For this project, little additional detail is needed.
  • Project Scope
    • State the scope of the project in this section of the Project Management Plan. The scope statement from the project charter should be used as a starting point; however, the project plan needs to include a much more detailed scope than the charter. This detail should include what the project does and does not include. The more detail included in this section, the better the product. This will help to clarify what is included in the project and help to avoid any confusion from project team members and stakeholders.
    • Customer Questions:
      • What are we trying to achieve?
      • When is the time deadline?
      • What are the goals of the project?
      • What will success look like? What are the key success criteria for the project?
      • What are the deliverables? (hardware, software, documentation, training, etc.)
      • What items fall outside the scope of this project
      • What areas of the existing system are functioning properly? What needs to be improved?
      • What are the assumptions for the project?
      • What are the risks for the project?
      • What are the dependencies in the project?
  • Milestone List
    • Provide a summary list of milestones including milestone name, description and completion dates. Only the high level milestones are required here. You will develop these milestones based on your understanding of the project.
  • Schedule Baseline and Work Breakdown Structure
    • This section of the Project Management Plan should discuss the WBS, WBS Dictionary, and Schedule baseline and how they will be used in managing the project’s scope. Since we will be using a scheduling tool for this project, the actual WBS project and Gantt charts will be created in the tool. You will use the tool to schedule the project, then simply detail the task name, task description, and scheduled start/end dates here.
  • Change Management Plan
    • This part of the Project Plan should describe your change control process. Your process should have the following steps:
      • Document the change
      • Assess impact of change on the project plan (both time and budget
      • Present impact to project sponsor for decision
      • Discuss impact of change with the customer
      • If change is approved by the customer, then update all project documentation and estimates
  • Communications Management Plan
    • The purpose of the Communications Management Plan is to define the communication requirements for the project and how information will be distributed to ensure project success. For this project, you will give a weekly report to your instructor using the project status template (see above). You should arrange the frequency of the project status report with your customer, probably 2 or 3 times during the project with a final demonstration
  • Cost Management Plan
    • The Cost Management Plan clearly defines how the costs on a project will be managed throughout the project’s lifecycle. Since there are no costs associated with your work, this section is not needed.
  • Procurement Management Plan
    • The Procurement Management Plan should be defined enough to clearly identify the necessary steps and responsibilities for procurement from the beginning to the end of a project. For a small project such as this, all that is neccessry is to identify anything that must be purchased and when the purchase is triggered. This could include domain names, hosting services, templates, themes, and any expendables.
  • Project Scope Management Plan
    • It is important that the approach to managing the projects’ scope be clearly defined and documented in detail. Failure to clearly establish and communicate project scope can result in delays, unnecessary work, failure to achieve deliverables, cost overruns, or other unintended consequences. For a small project such as this, hopefully the Change Management mechanism will be sufficient.
  • Schedule Management Plan
    • This section of the Project Plan provides a general framework for the approach which will be taken to create the project schedule. Effective schedule management is necessary for ensuring tasks are completed on time, resources are allocated appropriately, and to help measure project performance. This section of the Project Plan should include discussion of the scheduling tool/format, schedule milestones, and schedule development roles and responsibilities. In this project, you will be responsible for scheduling resources so that hard dates for milestones are met. Little additional documentation is needed.
  • Quality Management Plan
    • This portion of the Project Management Plan Template discusses how quality management will be used to ensure that the deliverables for the project meet a formally established standard of acceptance. For a small project, you will simply state that each deliverable will be tested/reviewed by staff and the customer.
  • Risk Management Plan
    • This part of the Project Plan provides a general description for the approach taken to identify and manage the risks associated with the project. There are few risks associated with a small project, so this may section may be omitted.
  • Risk Register
    • State any risks involved, their probabilty of occurring, their impact, and any possible mitigation. There are few risks associated with a small project, so this may section may be omitted.
  • Staffing Management Plan
    • Here the Project Plan Template discusses how you plan to staff the project. For a small project with few team members, this section can be omitted. HOWEVER, for planning purposes, each team member should commit to 10 hours per week working on the project. If there are four staff members with ten weeks remaining in the project, that means you have 400 person-hours to expend on the project. Can you get the project done with those resources?
  • Resource Calendar
    • Each team member will commit to 10 hours per work per week (or more) to complete the project. This section can be omitted.
  • Cost Baseline
    • Not needed for small projects.
  • Quality Baseline
    • Not needed for small projects.
  • Sponsor Acceptance
Assignment: Review the project management documents. In preparation for the meeting with your client, develop your questions for the following sections:
  • Introduction
  • Project Management Approach
  • Project Scope
Meet with your client. Be sure to ask all the questions necessary to complete the document. After the meeting, create a Project Management Plan in Google Docs, and share it with your team members and instructors. Fill out the sections outlined above except the Work Breakdown Structure.

Developing the Work Breakdown Structure

Download the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), which can be found at:

Get Started with the WBS

One of the best ways of project planning involves developing an affinity diagram for all of the requirements in the project. Using two colors of post-it notes and a white board to map out what needs to be done, when and by whom. Simple, but effective.

The affinity diagram process should run something like this:

  1. Using one color of post-it notes, write down all the milestones that you need to achieve on the way to the project outcome, and number them in chronological order. Stick them all down the left hand side of the board.
  2. For each milestone, identify any others that need to be achieved first, before that one can be either started or finished (precursors) and write them on the post-it note for that milestone.
  3. Now on a different color of post-it notes, identify all the tasks that need to be done to achieve each milestone. Use common sense to decide what level of granularity you want to work at. For example, if your overarching project is a recruitment exercise, you’ll want to spell out each step, from preparing job descriptions, through advertising, sifting, interviewing, carrying out checks, and offering the job. However, for a much larger project, you might include a task to ‘recruit project administrator’.
  4. For each task, identify which milestones they feed and write the milestone number on the post-it for the task. Write the feeder tasks on the post-it for each milestone.
  5. Identify how long each task (in person-hours) is going to take and write it on the task post-it.
  6. Identify what resources you need to achieve each task, and write it on the post-it.
  7. Take pictures of the post-it notes with your camera, as you will need it for the next session
Assignment: Using the affinity diagram procedure outline above, create a paper WBS. Document what you came up with, as you will need this for entry into the scheduling software.

Using Trello to Schedule Your Project

www.trello.com is a freemium, web-based ect management tool that allows you to take your Work Breakdown Structure and interactively schedule your project. All enterprise project management system, including Microsoft Project, Primavera, and others use the same techniques found in Trello.

Create a Trello Account

Navigate to http://www.trello.com and create an account

Project Leader will lay out the example web project

  • Click on Boards and create Sample Web Project
  • Next to Boards click on Sample Web Project Team then View Team Page. Add the members of your team, usually their UALR email.
  • On the right of the screen, click Show Menu then labels. Edit the labels as follows (be sure to put the number):
    • Green Label - 1. Project Initiation
    • Yellow Label - 2. Project Planning
    • Salmon Label - 3. Project Development
    • Red Label - 4. Project Testing
    • Purple Label - 5. Project Completion
  • Create the following lists and cards within the list:
    • Project Complete
    • Web Project in Progress
    • Project Initiation
      • Formulate Questions for Customer (label: Project Initiation)
      • Meet with Customer (label: Project Initiation)
    • Project Planning
      • Create Work Breakdown Structure (label: Project Planning)
      • Create Gantt Charts and Project Schedule (label: Project Planning)
      • Create Project Management Plan (label: Project Planning)
    • Project Development
      • Develop theme for website (label: Project Development)
      • Create and optimize imagery (label: Project Development)
      • Create navigation for website (label: Project Development)
      • Create webpage A (label: Project Development)
      • Create webpage B (label: Project Development)
      • Create webpage C (label: Project Development)
    • Project Testing
      • Final website testing (label: Project Testing)
    • Project Completion
      • Final website demonstration for customer (label: Project Completion)
      • Website installation (label: Project Completion)
      • Customer acceptance (label: Project Completion)
      • Archive Site Matrials (label: Project Completion)
  • On the right, click Show Menu, then Power-Ups , then select Gantt Chart(elegantt). You will have to intall the Chrome extension, close your browser and reopen it, then click the Elegantt symbol in the middle of the screen
  • Drag/widen/narrow each task so that it matches your estimated dates
  • Assign team members to each task