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

Monitoring And Controlling the Project

The following are the important themes that you must remember from the PMI Perspective with respect to the Monitoring & Controlling Phase of the Project.

1. Project changes should be expected, planned for, and well managed.
2. Out-of-scope work (gold-plating) adds no value to the project and should be avoided.
3. Scope verification ensures that the work product is formally accepted. Quality assurance ensures the correctness of the work product.
4. Lessons learned are important resources for planning and future projects. Maintaining the lessons learned during project control is important.
5. All change-control systems should include guidance on the following factors;
o How to influence the factors that cause change
o How to detect when a change has occurred
o How to obtain agreement on a change activity
o How to manage the change
6. Earned value is the preferred project controlling and performance reporting technique.
7. Cost variance (CV) = earned value – actual costs (EV – AC)
8. Cost Performance Index (CPI) = earned value / actual costs (EV / AC)
9. Schedule variance (SV) = earned value – planned value (EV – PV)
10. Schedule Performance Index (SPI) = earned value / planned value (EV / PV)
11. Estimate at completion (EAC) = budget at completion (BAC) / CPI
12. Estimate to complete (ETC) = EAC - actual costs (AC)
13. Variances are always “earned value” minus something. Performance indexes are always “earned value” divided by something.
14. Performance indexes of less than 1 are unfavorable. Nearer the index is to ‘1’ the better.
15. Practically speaking maintaining the SPI or CPI at exactly ‘1’ is very difficult. Most practical managers expect to maintain it around 0.95 to 1.05
16. Quality control focuses on measurement. Quality assurance focuses on all the planned and systematic quality activities within the project.
17. The key quality control tools and techniques are control charts, pareto analysis (80/20 rule), Ishikawa diagrams (cause and effect, fishbone), trend analysis, and statistical sampling.
18. Preventing a risk event is always preferred to mitigating a risk event.
19. A key goal of effective risk management is to have a response plan ready (that is, a mitigation strategy) to be implemented if the risk event occurs.
20. Risk management may require re-planning, developing alternate strategies, and re-baselining the project, depending on the severity of the new risk that was identified.

Exam Trivia:

Gold Plating or Value Addition is something that large IT company’s expect its employees to do as a mandatory activity during project work. But, from PMI’s perspective Gold Plating is prohibited and project managers and team members are not supposed to do stuff that is not part of the Project Scope. Though you might be asked to do so by your management and you may do it as part of your work, you must not select that as a choice in the exam.

Other PMI Themes:

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

Important Terms and Definitions - Monitoring & Controlling Project Work

As usual, let us wrap up the section on Monitoring & Controlling the Project Work by looking at the important terms and definitions we learnt as part of this section.

• Change control board - A formal group of stakeholders with the authority to process change requests, which includes reviewing, approving, rejecting, and delaying change requests.
• Change request - A request for deviating from the project plan or related policies or procedures, such as modifying scope, schedule, or cost. Change requests may include recommendations for corrective and preventive actions.
• Claim - An assertion, demand, or request made by a buyer against the seller or vice versa for consideration or compensation under the terms of a legal contract.
• Control - To analyze the performance and make and implement recommendations for corrective actions or other changes to bring the project back on track.
• Corrective actions - Actions recommended for execution in the future in order to bring project performance back in line with the project management plan.
• Monitor - To collect project performance information/data as planned, convert the information to performance measurements, and report the performance.
• Preventive actions - Actions to be executed to keep the project from getting off track—for example, to avoid risks or poor performance.
• Project performance - Measure of actual project progress against planned progress.

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Summary - Monitoring & Controlling Project Work

We have successfully completed the section on Monitoring & Controlling the Project Work. Let us summarize what we learnt about Monitoring & Controlling the Project Work.

• You need to monitor and control your project throughout its lifecycle, which includes monitoring and controlling project work, including procurements, performance, changes, quality, and risks.
• All these aspects of the project are monitored and controlled by using two high-level processes that belong to integration management:

o Monitor and Control Project Work and
o Perform Integrated Change Control.

• This also includes administering the procurement part of the project, which is another high-level process.
• The Monitor and Control Project Work process takes performance reports as input, compares them to the planned performance (baselines) in the project management plan, and, if needed, makes recommendations for changes to bring the project back on track.
• The change requests from this and other processes are run through the Perform Integrated Change Control process.
• Only the change requests approved through this process are implemented.
• Project procurements are administered by using many processes, including

o Perform Quality Control
o Report Performance
o Direct and Manage Project Execution
o Monitor and Control Risks and
o Perform Integrated Change Control.

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Next: Important Terms & Definitions - Monitoring & Controlling Project Work

Chapter 74: Monitoring and Controlling Project Work

Monitor and Control Project Work is a high-level process for monitoring and controlling project progress to ensure that the project is on its way to meet its objectives laid out in the project management plan. Some of the major tasks performed during this process are:

• Monitoring project performance by measuring it against the project management plan in terms of parameters such as cost, schedule, and scope
• Monitoring the project by collecting information to support status reporting, progress measurement, and predictions
• Evaluating performance to determine whether it needs to be controlled by taking corrective or preventive actions
• Monitoring risks by tracking and analyzing the already identified project risks and by identifying new risks
• Controlling risks by managing the execution of risk response plans when the risks occur
• Maintaining an accurate and timely information base regarding the project as it progresses
• Monitoring and controlling changes and monitoring the implementation of approved changes
• Monitoring and controlling quality and administering procurements

The Monitor and Control Project Work process is illustrated in the picture below:

Inputs to the Process:

The major input to this process is the performance reports, which are compared to the performance baseline in the project management plan. From this comparison, some changes may be requested as an output of this process, which may include recommendations for corrective actions, preventive actions, and defect repairs. The performance report consists of current project status, accomplishments, scheduled activities, forecasts, and current issues. This report is generated by using the Report Performance process which will be discussed in the next section.

Enterprise environmental factors used as input to this process include project management information systems, work authorization systems of the performing organization, risk tolerance level of the stakeholders, and industry and government standards.
The organizational process assets that can be used to perform this process include financial control procedures, the company’s communication requirements, management procedures regarding issues and defects, risk control procedures, process measurement database, and lessons learned from past projects.

Tools & Techniques used in this Process:

Apart from your expertise as project manager, there is no other tool or technique that is used as part of monitoring & controlling the project work.

Output of the Process:

As a result of performing this process, you may need to update some parts of the project management plan, such as scope baseline, schedule baseline, cost baseline, schedule management plan, cost management plan, and quality management plan. These updates often result from change requests made by various monitoring and controlling processes.

As mentioned earlier, change requests arising from monitoring and controlling the project or originating from any other source, such as the stakeholders, must be processed through the integrated change control process formally called Perform Integrated Change Control.

Actually, one of the important tasks of monitoring and controlling the project is to influence the factors that tend to circumvent the integrated change control process and ensure that only those changes that are approved through the integrated change control process are implemented.

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