Chapter 40: Summary - Project Management Process Groups

Not all project management processes apply to all projects or project phases. Process groups can overlap and interact. Forty-two project management processes are contained within the five project management process groups:
1. Initiating
2. Planning
3. Executing
4. Monitoring and controlling
5. Closing

Initiating Process Group

The Initiating Process Group Formally authorizes new project or project phase. The two processes in it are:
1. Develop project charter - Authorizing project or project phase. The project charter defines the project’s purpose, identifies objectives, and authorizes the project manager to start the project.
2. Identify stakeholders - Documents all of the people or organizations that have an interest in the outcome of the project and their level of interest, impact, and involvement.

Planning Process Group

The Planning Process Group Defines objectives and plans course of action required to meet objectives and project scope. It also facilitates project planning across process groups. The Processes in the Planning Process Group are:
1. Develop project management plan - Primary source for how project is planned, executed, monitored, controlled, and closed. It’s an iterative and ongoing process often resulting in changes to the project management plan. This progressive detailing is called rolling wave planning.
2. Collect requirements - Documenting the stakeholders’ needs to meet the project objectives.
3. Define scope - Developing a detailed project scope.
4. Create WBS - Subdividing major project deliverables and project work into smaller, more manageable components.
5. Define activities - Identifying specific activities to be performed to produce project deliverables.
6. Sequence activities - Identifying and documenting dependencies among schedule activities.
7. Estimate activity resources - Type and quantity of resources required to perform each schedule activity.
8. Estimate activity durations - Number of work periods needed to complete individual schedule activities.
9. Develop schedule - Analyzing activity sequences, durations, resource requirements, and schedule constraints to create project schedule.
10. Estimate costs - Developing approximation of costs of resources needed to complete project activities.
11. Determine budget - Aggregating estimated costs of individual activities to establish cost baseline.
12. Plan quality - Identifying relevant quality standards and determining how to satisfy them.
13. Develop human resource plan - Identifying and documenting project roles, responsibilities, and reporting relationships.
14. Plan communications - Determining stakeholder communication needs.
15. Plan risk management - Deciding how to approach, plan, and execute risk management activities.
16. Identify risks - Determining which risks might affect the project and documenting their characteristics.
17. Perform qualitative risk analysis - Prioritizing risks for subsequent further analysis by assessing and combining their probabilities of occurrence and impacts.
18. Perform quantitative risk analysis - Numerically analyzing the effect on project objectives of identified risks.
19. Plan risk responses - Developing options to enhance opportunities and reduce threats to project objectives.
20. Plan procurements - Documenting products, services, and results requirements and identifying potential sellers.

Executing Process Group

The Executing Process Group Integrates resources to carry out project management plan. The processes in this group are
1. Direct and manage project execution - Directing technical and organization interfaces to execute work defined in project management plan.
2. Perform quality assurance - Applying planned, systematic quality activities to ensure project employs processes needed to meet requirements.
3. Acquire project team - Obtaining human resources needed to complete project.
4. Develop project team - Development improves competencies and interaction of team members.
5. Manage project team - Tracking team member performance, providing feedback, resolving issues, and coordinating changes to enhance project performance.
6. Distribute information - Providing information to stakeholders in a timely manner.
7. Manage stakeholder expectations - Managing stakeholder expectations to satisfy their requirements and resolve issues.
8. Conduct procurements - Obtaining seller responses, selecting sellers, and awarding contracts.

Monitoring and Controlling Process Group

The Monitoring & Controlling Process Group Monitors progress to identify variances from the project management plan so corrective action can be taken to meet project objectives. The processes in this group are:
1. Monitor and control project work - Collecting, measuring, and disseminating performance information and assessing measurements and trends to affect process improvements. Includes risk monitoring to ensure risks are identified early, their statuses reported, and risk plans executed. Monitoring includes status reporting, progress measurement, and forecasting.
2. Perform integrated change control - Ensure changes are beneficial; determine whether a change has occurred; and manage approved changes, including when they occur. Performed throughout project life cycle.
3. Verify scope - Acceptance of completed project deliverables.
4. Control scope - Controlling changes to project scope.
5. Control schedule - Controlling changes to project schedule.
6. Control costs - Influencing factors that create variances and controlling changes to project budget.
7. Perform quality control - Monitoring project results to determine compliance with quality standards and identifying ways to eliminate unsatisfactory performance.
8. Report performance - Collecting and distributing performance information, including status reporting, progress measurement, and forecasting.
9. Monitor and control risks - Tracking identified risks, monitoring risks, identifying new risks, executing risk response plans, and evaluating their effectiveness throughout the project life cycle.
10. Administer procurements - Managing contract between buyer and seller, reviewing and documenting seller performance, and managing contractual relationship with outside buyer of project.

Closing Process Group

The Closing Process Group Formalizes acceptance of product, service, or result and brings project or project phase to an end. The processes in this group are:
1. Close project or phase - Finalizing all activities across process groups to formally close project or project phase.
2. Close procurements - Completing each procurement, including resolution of open items, and closing each procurement relevant to project or project phase.

Prev: Chapter 39

Next: Chapter 41

Project Closing

The following are the important themes you must remember from the PMI Perspective regarding the Project Closing Phase.

1. Administrative closeout includes the updating and finalization of all project related documents and records.
2. The goal of a procurement audit is to review the successes and failures of the procurement process in order to transfer the knowledge gained to other procurements.
3. The requirements for formal contract closeout are defined in the contract terms and conditions.
4. The person responsible for contract administration should provide formal acceptance to the seller in writing.
5. The criteria necessary to ensure project closure are formal customer acceptance and meeting the requirements of the delivering organization.
6. Lessons learned should be documented throughout the project lifecycle.
7. Administrative closure should be performed at the end of each phase in a project.

Exam Trivia:
In practical project management scenarios, if the customer is not fully satisfied with the end product that is delivered, the manager and the project executing organization expects us to deliver what the customer wants. But, as per PMI, if the team delivers everything that is present in the approved Scope Statement, then our work is over and the Customer has no right to demand any changes during project closure. So, if you spot such a question in the exam, remember that you cannot take up additional changes to the project scope even though that is not what you would do in real life.

Other PMI Themes:

General PMI Themes
Project Framework
Project Initiation
Project Planning
Project Execution
Project Monitoring & Controlling
Ethics & Professional Responsibility

Chapter 89: Big Picture of Closing the Project

Project closure refers to a set of tasks that are required to formally end the project. There are two kinds of projects that you need to close formally:

• Completed projects - A project that has met its completion criteria falls into this category.
• Terminated projects - A project that was terminated before its completion falls into this category. A project can be terminated at various stages for various reasons. Some examples are:

o The project management plan is not approved for whatever reason.
o The project has been executing, but you have run out of resources, and no more resources are available.
o The project has been cancelled because it was going nowhere.
o The project has been indefinitely postponed because there is not a large enough market for the product it would produce.

A project, in general, may have in-house activities i.e., project activities being performed within the performing organization and procurement activities. Accordingly, there are two aspects of project closure:

• Close the in-house activities of the project.
• Close the procurement part of the project.

Project closure includes the following activities:

• Activities to verify that all deliverables have been provided and accepted
• Activities to confirm that all the project requirements, including stakeholder requirements, have been met
• Activities to verify that the completion or exit criteria have been met
• Activities to ensure that the project product is transferred to the right individual or group
• Activities to review the project for lessons learned and archive the project records

You need to obtain final closure, such as acceptance signoffs, contract closure, or receipts for both the in-house part and the procurement part of the project and from both internal and external vendors and customers. You perform this task by using standard accounting practices and following the relevant organizational and legal procedures, such as SOX compliance.

Trivia:
SOX refers to The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, also known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002. It is a United States Federal law enacted on July 30, 2002, in response to a number of major corporate and accounting scandals that affected companies such as Enron and WorldCom. These scandals cost investors billions of dollars when the share prices of affected companies collapsed and therefore shook public confidence in the nation’s securities markets.

The Big Picture of this process can be illustrated using the picture below:

This includes:

1. Verify the scope of the project deliverables developed in house.
2. Accept the procured deliverables through the procurement closure process.
3. Get the deliverables from Step 1 and Step 2 and get them accepted by the customer or sponsor to actually close the project.
4. Archive the project documents.

In a nutshell, all the aspects of the project closure should be covered, such as financial closure, legal closure, and administrative closure, with all the relevant parties, such as vendors and customers external and internal to the performing organization.

Prev: Introduction to Closing the Project

Next: Verifying the Scope of Project Deliverables

Chapter 88: Introduction to Closing the Project

We have successfully stepped into the last stage of the project. The last deliverable on the project schedule has been completed, and you think that the project has been a big success.
However, hold off on the project party for a few more days; the project has not ended yet. It has just reached another stage called the project closing stage, and, as a project manager, you need to continue monitoring and controlling the project through this stage. Also, recall that there are two kinds of project work; in house and procured. So you need to put a closure on the procured component of the project and then run the procured deliverables through the project closure process. The deliverables developed in house should be verified to check whether they meet the scope before running them through the closure process. In other words, what was planned to be done has actually been done. So that nothing falls between the cracks and for legal reasons, you need to formally close the project. This involves finalizing all the project and project management activities and giving them a proper closure. You should do this even when the project is being terminated before the planned finish line (A Total Disaster). After all the planned deliverables both developed in house and procured have been verified, the project should be closed with the acceptance of the deliverables by the appropriate party and by archiving the appropriate documents.

This is what we are going to do in the next few chapters.

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Next: Big Picture of Closing the Project