Chapter 41: Summary - Project Management Knowledge Areas

Not all project management knowledge areas apply to all projects or project phases. Knowledge areas can interact and overlap.

All the 42 project management processes in the PMBOK are part of one of the nine project management knowledge areas:
1. Integration Management
2. Scope Management
3. Time Management
4. Cost Management
5. Quality Management
6. Human resource Management
7. Communications Management
8. Risk Management
9. Procurement Management

Project Integration Management

The processes that are part of Project Integration Management are:
1. Develop project charter
2. Develop project management plan
3. Direct and manage project execution
4. Monitor and control project work
5. Perform integrate change control
6. Close project or phase

Project Scope Management

The five processes that are part of Project Scope Management are:
1. Collect requirements
2. Define scope
3. Create WBS
4. Verify scope
5. Control scope

Project Time Management

The six processes that are part of Project Time Management are:
1. Define activities
2. Sequence activities
3. Estimate activity resources
4. Estimate activity durations
5. Develop schedule
6. Control schedule

Project Cost Management

The three processes that are part of Project Cost Management are:
1. Estimate costs
2. Determine budget
3. Control costs

Project Quality Management

The three processes that are part of Project Quality Management are
1. Plan quality
2. Perform quality assurance
3. Perform quality control

Project Human Resource Management

The four processes that are part of Project Human Resource Management are
1. Develop human resource plan
2. Acquire project team
3. Develop project team
4. Manage project team

Project Communication Management

The five processes that are part of Project Communication Management are
1. Identify stakeholders
2. Plan communications
3. Distribute information
4. Manage stakeholder expectations
5. Report performance

Project Risk Management

The six processes that are part of Project Risk Management are:
1. Plan risk management
2. Identify risks
3. Perform qualitative risk analysis
4. Perform quantitative risk analysis
5. Plan risk responses
6. Monitor and control risks

Project Procurement Management

The four processes that are part of Project Procurement Management are
1. Plan procurements
2. Conduct procurements
3. Administer procurements
4. Close procurements

Prev: Chapter 40

Next: Chapter 42

Chapter 21: Project Quality Management as part of Project Execution

Aim: To understand the Perform quality assurance Process

Quality assurance is the process of auditing quality requirements and the results from quality control measurements that are used to ensure the project employs all processes needed to meet requirements. It differs from quality control, which is monitoring specific project results to ensure they meet quality standards.

Exam Watch:

Even though the Perform Quality Assurance is part of the Executing phase and Quality Control is part of Monitoring & controlling, the output of Perform Quality Control is used as an input to Quality Assurance. Don’t get confused here. Both these activities happen hand in hand and the segregation between the Execution and Controlling phases is very slim.

The table below shows the inputs, tools and techniques, and outputs for the perform quality assurance process.

Perform Quality Assurance
Inputs	Tools & Techniques	Outputs
Project management plan Quality metrics Work performance information Quality control measurements	Plan quality and perform quality control tools and techniques Quality audits Process analysis	Organizational process asset updates Change requests Project management plan updates Project document updates

PMI stresses the importance of continuous improvement, which is an iterative process for improving quality. Continuous improvement is an ongoing cycle of process analysis leading to process improvements at which point further process analysis is undertaken. Process analysis is an in-depth look at what processes are being executed, how they are executed, by whom, and related processes.

The benefits of continuous improvement include reduced waste and reduction in non–value-added processes, leading to increased efficiency and effectiveness.

Work performance information is an important input to quality assurance. Work performance information is defined as data on the status of project schedule activities. It can include such items as technical performance measurements, project deliverables status, schedule progress, and costs incurred. This information can be used in audits, quality reviews, and process analysis. Other important inputs to quality assurance include approved change requests and quality control measurements. Approved change requests are any change requests that have been processed through the change management process and approved by the proper authority. Quality control measurements are the results of quality control activities.

Exam Watch:

1. Memorize and understand all the inputs to quality assurance.
2. The tools used in quality planning and quality control can also be used in quality assurance

Along with the tools used in quality planning and quality control, two other tools in quality assurance are quality audits and process analysis. Quality audits are independent reviews to verify compliance with quality standards. For example, a review team looks at control charts to determine if the processes were being controlled properly and if proper actions were taken when processes fell outside control limits. Process analysis supports continuous improvement as explained in the previous section.

Exam Watch:

Root cause analysis is a technique to examine a problem, determine the underlying cause of the problem, and implement corrective action to prevent further occurrence.

The application of quality assurance might result in changes to the project, which take the form of change requests or recommended corrective action. Updates are made to the project management plan and/or organizational process assets.

Prev: Chapter 20

Next: Chapter 22

Project Execution

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

1. The project manager is ultimately responsible for the Project Execution
2. The Project Manager is ultimately responsible for the quality of the project.
3. The project team should solve its own problems and resolve its own issues whenever possible.
4. Team development occurs throughout the entire project lifecycle.
5. The five types of power that are available to a project manager are legitimate, coercive, reward, expert, and referent. Coercive or Punishment power should be used rarely and should never be used in public. If you are punishing someone for bad behavior or performance, make sure it is one on one in your cabin and not in a public place
6. The five conflict-resolution techniques are confronting (preferred method), compromising, withdrawal, smoothing, and forcing.
7. The performance evaluation process of an individual should include everyone who has had significant interaction with that individual.
8. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, in order, is physical, safety and security, social, self-esteem, and self-actualization.
9. Herzberg's Hygiene Theory suggests that pay is not as motivating as work satisfaction, learning new skills, and promotions, and it suggests that relationships only prevent job dissatisfaction; they do not motivate.
10. A McGregor Theory X Manager micromanages his team’s work and does not trust them. A Theory Y Manager trusts his team and expects them to be responsible for their work and motivates them to be successful.

Other PMI Themes:

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

Points to Remember: Project Quality Management

Quality is the measurement of how closely your product meets its requirements.

Whenever we talk about quality the following 3 terms invariably pop up. They are:

1. Customer satisfaction is about making sure that the people who are paying for the end product are happy with what they get. When the team gathers requirements for the specification, they try to write down all of the things that the customers want in the product so that you know how to make them happy. Some requirements can be left unstated, too. Those are the ones that are implied by the customer’s explicit needs. In the end, if you fulfill all of your requirements, your customers should be really satisfied.

2. Fitness for use is about making sure that the product you build has the best design possible to fit the customer’s needs. Which would you choose: a product that’s beautifully designed, well constructed, solidly built, and all-around pleasant to look at but does not do what you need, or a product that does what you want despite being really ugly to look at and a pain in the butt to work with? You’ll always choose the product that fits your needs, even if it’s seriously limited. That’s why it’s important that the product both does what it is supposed to do and does it well.

3. Conformance to requirements is the core of both customer satisfaction and fitness for use. Above all, your product needs to do what you wrote down in your requirements specification. Your requirements should take into account both what will satisfy your customer and the best design possible for the job. In the end, your product’s quality is judged by whether you built what you said you would build.

Quality Vs Grade

People often confuse Quality with Grade. Lets take a simple example: Watches...

Lets say Brand A is a popular brand of watches in India which costs Rs.2500 to Rs. 10000/- per watch whereas Brand B is an even popular brand which costs Rs.25000 to Rs.50000/-. Both brands make high quality watches but they are of different grade. As per their cost, people will value Brand A to be much lesser in monetary value than Brand B is. Hence Brand B is of a higher grade than Brand A. Nonetheless, if your Brand B watch fails to work after 3 days, its supposed to be of bad quality even though it is of very high grade.

Grade has nothing to do with quality. They are both two not-so-related terms which people tend to confuse often. As PMP Certified Project Managers, we must be able to tell them apart...

Now get the picture?

There are three processes in the Quality Management knowledge area, and they’re all designed to make sure that you and your team deliver the highest quality product that you can.

1. Plan Quality is like the other planning processes you’ve learned about—you create a Quality Management Plan to help guide you and your team through quality activities.
2. Perform Quality Control is the Monitoring & Controlling process where you look at each deliverable and inspect it for defects.
3. Perform Quality Assurance is where you take a step back and look at how well your project fits in with your company’s overall quality standards and guidelines.

Cost of quality is what you get when you add up the cost of all of the prevention and inspection activities you are going to do on your project. It doesn’t just include the testing. It includes any time spent writing standards, reviewing documents, meeting to analyze the root causes of defects, rework to fix the defects once they’re found by the team—absolutely everything you do to ensure quality on the project.

Metrics tell what and how you are going to measure your product’s quality. They give you some objective measures to help you make better judgments about it.

Validated deliverables and validated changes are two of the most important outputs of Perform Quality Control. Every single deliverable on the project needs to be inspected to make sure it meets your quality standards. If you find defects, the team needs to fix them—and then those repairs need to be checked, to make sure the defects are now gone.

Inspection means checking each deliverable for defects. That means checking your specs and your documentation, as well as your product, for bugs.

The better your Plan Quality, the less inspection you need.

Ishikawa diagrams help you to pinpoint the causes of defects.

The rule of seven means that any time you have seven data points in a row that fall on the same side of the mean on a control chart, you need to figure out why.

When data points fall above the upper limit or below the lower limit on a control chart, the process is out of control.

For the test, using any of the seven basic quality tools is usually a good indication that you are in the Quality Control process.

Ishikawa, fishbone, and cause-and-effect diagrams are all the same thing.

Scatter charts help you look at the relationship between two different kinds of data.

Flowcharts help you get a handle on how processes work by showing all of the decision points graphically.

Grade refers to the value of a product, but not its quality. So, a product can be low-grade by design, and that’s fine. But if it’s a low-quality product, that’s a big problem

Quality Audits are reviews of your project by your company. They figure out whether or not you are following the company’s process. The point is
to figure out if there are ways to help you be more effective by finding the stuff you are doing on your project that is inefficient or that causes defects. When you find those problem areas, you recommend corrective actions to fix them.

Process Analysis is when you look at your process to find out how to make it better. You use your process improvement plan to do this one.


Points to Remember - Other Topics:

Introduction to Projects & Project Management
Relationship Between Knowledge Areas & Process Groups
Project Integration Management
Project Scope Management
Project Time Management
Project Cost Management
Human Resource Management
Project Communication Management
Project Risk Management
Project Procurement Management
Ethics & Professional Responsibility

Chapter 78: Big Picture of Quality Management

Quality is an integral part of any project and a project delivered on time and within budget but of poor quality is as worthless as the project that is not delivered at all. Now, I guess you understand the importance of delivering stuff with good quality.

The big picture of controlling quality is illustrated in the picture below:

Controlling quality involves monitoring specific results to determine whether they comply with the planned quality standards, which include project processes and product goals, and controlling the results by taking actions to eliminate unsatisfactory performance. In other words, the Perform Quality Control process is used to monitor and control quality by accomplishing the following goals:

• Monitor specific project results, such as cost performance and schedule performance, to determine whether they comply with the planned quality standards, which include project processes and product goals.
• Identify ways to eliminate the causes of unsatisfactory performance.

The results under scrutiny include both deliverables and performance measurements by the project management team. Quality control is performed throughout the project. While dealing with quality control, you must be able to distinguish between the two terms in each of the following pairs:

• Prevention and inspection
• Prevention is a direction to perform an activity that will keep an error from entering the product and the process.
• Inspection is a technique to examine whether an activity, component, product, result, or service complies with planned requirements. The goal of inspection is to ensure that errors do not reach the customer.
• Attribute sampling and variable sampling
• Attribute sampling is a technique to determine whether a result conforms to the specified standard.
• Variable sampling is a technique to rate a result on a continuous scale that measures the degree of conformity.
• Common cause and special cause
• Common cause is a source of variation that is inherent to the system and is predictable. Such variations are also called normal variations, and the common causes for them are also called random causes.
• Special cause is a source of variation that is not inherent to the system and is removable. It can be assigned to a defect in the system.
• Control limits and tolerances
• Control limits is the area occupied by three standard deviations on either side of the central line or the mean of a normal distribution of data plotted on a control chart that reflects the expected variation of the data. If the results fall within the control limits, they are within the quality control.
• Tolerance is the range within which a result is acceptable if it falls within the limits of the range.

Prev: Introduction

Next: Controlling Quality

Chapter 48: Planning Quality

In the previous chapter, we saw the importance of planning for a projects quality. We saw a high level overview of how quality management happens in an organization but we haven’t jumped into the details yet. Well, this is the chapter where we jump into the ocean.

So, lets get started!!!

What is Quality?

According to PMBOK, quality is defined as the degree to which a set of characteristics of project deliverables and objectives fulfill the project requirements. Therefore, any characteristic that influences the satisfaction of the stakeholders is included in determining the quality. The project quality management processes include performing quality planning, quality assurance, and quality control. Quality planning is the quality process that is performed during the planning phase to accomplish the following goals.

• Identify which quality standards are relevant to the project at hand
• Determine how to satisfy these standards

The picture below explains this process:

Input to Quality Planning

The key input items for this phase of quality planning are:
Project performance baseline - The project performance baseline constituted by the scope baseline, schedule baseline, and cost baseline contains the list of all the deliverables and objectives to which the quality needs to be applied. For example, the following components of the project scope statement are especially relevant to quality planning:
• Project deliverables.
• Project objectives.
• Project requirements.
• A product scope description that may contain the details of technical issues and other quality-related concerns.
• Product acceptance criteria. The definition of acceptance criteria has an impact on the quality cost.

You find out the accepted schedule performance from the schedule baseline and the accepted cost performance from the cost baseline.

Stakeholder register and risk register - The stakeholder register may help in identifying the stakeholders that will have interests in quality. The risk register will help identify positive risks (opportunities) and negative risks (threats) that may have impact on deliverable quality.

Enterprise environmental factors - Guidelines, regulations from a government agency, rules, and standards relevant to the project at hand are examples of enterprise environmental factors that must be considered during quality planning. For example, procedures relevant to the application area of this project should be followed. Working or operating conditions and environment can also affect the project quality.

Organizational process assets - The following organizational process assets can affect the project from the perspective of quality planning:
• Information from previous projects and lessons learned
• Quality-related historical database
• An organizational quality policy, which is composed of overall intentions and high-level direction of an organization with respect to quality, established by the management at executive level

If the performing organization lacks a quality policy, the project team will need to develop a quality policy for the project. Once a quality policy is in place, it is your responsibility to ensure that the project stakeholders are aware of it and are on the same page.

Tools and Techniques Used for Quality Planning

The tools and techniques used for quality planning include benchmarking, cost/benefit analysis, experiment design, and brainstorming.

Benchmarking - Benchmarking is comparing practices, products, or services of a project with those of some reference projects for the purposes of learning, improving, and creating the basis for measuring performance. These reference projects might be previous projects performed inside or outside of the performing organization. Improvement and performance are of course quality-related factors. For example, you might have a similar project performed in the past that accepted no more than two defects in each feature. You might use that as a quality criterion or simply put a benchmark for your project.

Cost of quality and cost/benefit analysis - The cost of quality is the total quality-related cost during the lifecycle of the product. That includes the costs incurred in implementing conformance to the requirements, reworking due to the defects resulting from failure to meet the requirements, and updating the product or service to meet the requirements. The cost of performance consists of prevention costs and appraisal costs. Prevention costs include the costs of appropriate equipment, documenting and performing processes, time and effort to perform the project work the right way, and needed training of the team members. The appraisal costs include the costs of inspecting, testing, and loss due to destructive testing. Cost of nonconformance includes rework and waste of time and effort if the product is rejected internally because it did not meet the quality standards. If the problems with the product were found by the customer, however, the results could be more much more costly and damaging, including liabilities and loss of business.

During quality planning, you must consider the tradeoff between the cost and the benefit of quality and strike the appropriate balance for a given project. Implementing quality has its costs, including quality management and fulfilling quality requirements. The benefits of meeting quality requirements include less rework, resulting in overall higher productivity; lower costs of maintaining the product or service; and higher customer satisfaction.

Experiment design - Also called design of experiments (DOE), this is a statistical method that can be used to identify the factors that might influence a set of specific variables for a product or a process under development or in production. You look for optimal conditions by changing the values of a number of variables simultaneously rather than changing one variable at a time. By using the results from this technique, you can optimize the products and processes. For example, you can use DOE to strike the right balance between cost of quality and its benefits. During planning, DOE can also be used to determine the types of tests and their impact on cost of quality.

Other quality planning tools - Other tools that you can use in quality planning, depending upon the project, include brainstorming, flowcharting, control charts, and statistical sampling. Statistical sampling involves randomly selecting a part of the population for study. Control charts, flowcharting, and statistical sampling will be covered in great detail in future when we discuss Quality Control. Some other tools of quality planning are:
• Affinity diagrams - A business tool used to organize a large set of data and ideas into logical groups based on the relationships among these ideas.
• Force field analysis - A technique to understand the forces (factors) influencing a situation. It can be used to separate the forces that drive movement toward a goal from those that either block that movement or drive it away from the goal.
• Matrix diagrams - This method is used to explore the relationships between different entities, such as objectives and causes, by displaying these entities in a matrix, with cells of the matrix representing the relationships.
• Nominal group techniques - These are the decision-making methods that are used among groups of different sizes with two goals in mind: Make the decision quickly and take everyone’s opinion into account. One example involves decision making by a group of one size, then a review of all those ideas from brainstorming by a group of another size, and then making the final decision by a group of yet another size.
• Prioritization matrices - This is the method of prioritizing entities, such as problems, ideas, and issues, by using some ranking criteria.

Output of Quality Planning

The outputs of the quality planning process are:

Quality management plan - The quality management plan describes how the quality policy for this project will be implemented by the project management team. It includes approaches to quality assurance, quality control, and continuous process improvement. The quality management plan also contains the quality baseline that sets the criteria that specify the quality objectives for the project and thereby makes the basis for measuring and reporting quality performance. For example, a project that is finished on time, with everything delivered in scope, and that stayed within its cost is a project with high quality performance.
This plan becomes a component of the overall project management plan.

Quality metrics - This is an operational criterion that defines in specific terms what something (such as a characteristic or a feature) is and how the quality control process measures it. For example, it is not specific enough to say the defects in the product will be minimized. Rather, specifying something such as that no feature will have more than two defects is a measurable criterion and hence a metric. Some examples of quality metrics are cost performance, schedule performance, defect frequency, failure rate, and test coverage. The metrics that you set during quality planning will be used in quality assurance and quality control.

Quality checklist - A checklist is a structured tool used to verify that a predetermined set of required steps has been performed. The checklists can come in imperative form (“to do” lists) or in interrogative form ("have you done this" lists). Checklists are prepared during quality planning and used during quality control.

Process improvement plan - This plan describes how to improve some of the processes that will be used in the project. For example, one purpose of improvement is to prevent activities in the processes that are not needed for this project. This is accomplished by describing the purpose, start, and end of a given process, the input to the process, and the output of the process. This is equivalent to drawing boundaries around the process. The process improvement plan may also include some metrics used to measure the efficiency of the process.

Updates to project documents - During quality planning, you may end up making changes that will require modifying corresponding documents, such as the stakeholder register and responsibility assignment matrix (RAM).

Prev: Big Picture of Quality Management

Next: Big Picture of Risk Management

Chapter 47: Big Picture of Quality Management

Quality refers to the degree to which a set of characteristics of project deliverables and objectives fulfills the project requirements. In other words, it is the sum of project and product characteristics that help fulfill the requirements.

Simply put – Does the project or product meet its requisite purpose properly? If so, we can consider our product/project to be of good quality.

The broader goal of quality management is to ensure that a given project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken.

Quality management has two components:
1. Project quality management and
2. Product quality management.

While product quality management techniques depend upon the specific product that the project is going to produce, project quality management applies to all projects independent of the nature of the products.

While dealing with quality, you should be able to distinguish between the terms in the following pairs:
• Grade and quality - Grade is a category assigned to products with the same overall functional use but that differ in their technical characteristics and features, whereas quality is the degree to which the inherent characteristics of a product meet the requirements. Number of defects is an example of poor quality, whereas a limited number of features is an example of low grade.
• Precision and accuracy - Precision is a spread of different measurements of the same quantity, constant, or variable, such as gravity or cost. The smaller the spread of measured values, the better the precision. Accuracy is a measurement of how close the measured values are to the true value of the quantity. The closer the measured value is to the actual (or true) value, the better the accuracy of measurements.
• Prevention and inspection - Prevention is a direction to perform an activity that will keep an error from entering the product and the process. Inspection is a technique to examine whether an activity, component, product, result, or service complies with planned requirements. So, the goal of inspection is to ensure that errors do not reach the customer.

Trivia:
PMI’s approach to quality management is intended to be compatible with that of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and is compatible with proprietary approaches to quality, such as those proposed by Crosby, Deming, Juan, and others. It is also compatible with proprietary approaches to quality management, such as continuous improvement, cost of quality (COQ), design reviews, failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA), Six Sigma, Total Quality Management (TQM), and the voice of the customer.

Project management and quality management have come a long way as separate disciplines of knowledge and practice. It should not come as a surprise that quality management is one of nine knowledge areas in standard project management. In a complementary way, both modern quality management and project management recognize the importance of the following critical points:

Continuous improvement

Continuous improvement means continuing to improve the quality through a process of planning for quality, implementing quality, auditing quality, and re-planning based on lessons learned or auditing. So really, quality improvement is an endless cycle, called a plan-do-check-act cycle as defined by Shewhart and modified by Deming. Performing organizations can also use techniques such as Six Sigma and TQM to improve the quality.

Trivia:
Methodologies like Six Sigma and ITIL are based on this concept of continuous improvement

Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction can be a very vague notion that can mean different things to different parties. However, in project management and quality management, customer satisfaction means planned customer requirements are met. To achieve customer satisfaction in the real world, you need to understand, define, and evaluate the customer expectations and also manage those expectations, in addition to meeting the planned requirements. Otherwise, you might meet the planned requirements, and the customer may still be dissatisfied.

Trivia:
Customer Satisfaction is one of the key performance indicators for any project manager. A good project manager will not only deliver a good quality work product but also meet or strive to always exceed customer expectations and keep the customer happy and satisfied always. After all, Customer is King in any business.

Management responsibility

This refers to the responsibility of management to provide resources needed for the project team to succeed. Although all team members should be responsible for the success of their parts of the project, they cannot succeed without management responsibility.

Trivia:
A project team cannot deliver a product without the requisite logistics. A workstation, a server, a database and a network are all mandatory requirements for any product and it’s the responsibility of the management to provide these to their team members in order for the team to deliver the work.

Prevention over inspection

One of the fundamental tenets of modern quality management is plan, design, and build in quality as opposed to inspect in. The cost of preventing mistakes is much less than finding them through inspections and then fixing them. Therefore, cost of quality (COQ) is less in prevention than through inspection. The COQ is defined as the total cost of quality-related efforts throughout the product lifecycle.

Trivia:
The age old saying “Better Safe Than Sorry” speaks volumes.

Look at the image below to understand the high level quality management process:

The Quality Management process explained in the picture above has the following processes:

• Plan Quality - This process is used to identify which quality requirements and standards are relevant to the project at hand and to determine how to meet these requirements and standards, as well as how compliance to the quality requirements will be demonstrated.
• Perform Quality Assurance - This process is used to audit the fulfillment of quality requirements to ensure that the project employs all the planned quality requirements and standards.
• Perform Quality Control - This process monitors project results to ensure that they meet the agreed-upon quality standards and identifies ways to eliminate the factors that keep the project results from meeting standards—that is, to make recommendations for changes or actions.

The processes for quality assurance are used as part of executing the project, and quality control is used as part of monitoring and controlling the project. These processes are therefore discussed in forthcoming chapters. Quality planning is performed during the project planning stage and so we will cover that next.

Prev: Introduction to Quality & Risk Management

Next: Planning Quality

Chapter 46: Introduction to Quality & Risk Management

Till now we have covered how to plan for a project scope, project resources and project procurement. The next planning we need to do is “Planning the Projects Quality & Risk”. In the next few chapters, we will be covering these in details.

So, lets get started!!!

Why Quality & Risk Management is Essential?

Quality and risk are two important interrelated aspects of any project that need to be managed. While quality refers to the degree to which a set of characteristics of project deliverables and objectives fulfill the project requirements, risk refers to an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on meeting the project objectives.

Consider the following two scenarios:

Scenario 1:

Your project just went live. You have created an online banking website for some bank in America and the website is live. As soon as customers start using the website, it is frequently crashing, customers are not able to view their account balance or perform fund transfer. All in all, the website isn’t meeting its required objectives. What went wrong here?

There was no quality management done. The quality of the work product delivered to the customer isn’t up to expectations and hence it’s a total disaster.

Scenario 2:

Lets say, you are on your way to deliver a major online banking website for a large bank in America. You are midway through the project and suddenly your Technical Lead has resigned. He was the center point for all technical discussions in the project and his departure is going to leave a big void and now people are worried that we may not be able to finish the project. What went wrong here?

There was no risk management done. Every project has its own set of inherent risks that may delay the project delivery and if we fail to plan for such risks, the project will be a total disaster.

After you have planned the project scope to the WBS level, as discussed in the previous chapters, you are ready to plan the quality and risk management. After the project starts executing, you will not have enough time to plan a response to a risk if it occurs, so you need to plan risk responses before the project starts executing. To do that, you need to identify the risks and analyze them.

So, the main things we will learn in this section are:
1. How do you plan for quality and risk management?
2. Learn how to plan quality
3. Identify and analyze risks
4. Plan risk responses.

This chapter is just an introduction and we will jump into the details in the subsequent chapters.

Prev: Important Terms - Project Resource Planning

Next: Big Picture of Quality Management

Chapter 24: Planning the Project

In the previous chapters, we learnt how to Initiate a Project, how to create a project charter, how to identify stakeholders and how to prepare a stakeholder management strategy.

The next big step after initiating a project is to plan for the project.

What is Project Planning?

Any Project that needs to be executed has to be planned. Any tasks that was begun without proper planning and due diligence is almost always a failure. So, as a responsible project manager you have to plan your project properly to ensure that, your baby is a success. After all, which project manager wants to spend months of his time on a failing cause? Atleast, I don’t …

What are the Phases Involved in Project Planning?

Project Planning involves 4 important phases. They are:

1. Planning the Project Scope
2. Planning the Project Resources
3. Planning the Project Schedule
4. Planning Quality & Risk Management

Each of these 4 phases is equally important and have a significant impact on the success of the project.

As Project Managers we need to put in dedicated effort to plan for each of these phases and as expected, the PMP exam covers each of these in depth.

In the forthcoming chapters, we will be starting with Project Scope Management and then move on to the other phases in Project Planning one by one.

Previous: Important Terms & Definitions

Next: Introduction to Project Planning