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There are 9 knowledge areas
- Stakeholder Management
- Scope Management
- Time Management
- Cost Management
- Quality Management
- Procurement Management
- Risk Management
- Communications Management
- Human Resource Management
- Integrating all these 9 knowledge areas and delivering a project is using Integration management.
- Don’t do anything unless you know why you are doing it.
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We might not be able make the project clearer by adding many more details and calculations.
- Check for weakest links and strength it to make the project more effective
- Plan first before starting anything on a project.
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Get the requirements/ scope clear before you start delivering.
- Pay attention to the problem/ pain areas.
- Project is providing resolution to a problem.
- Sometimes the correct solution is already selected by the time a PM has been allocated.
- Project charter will contain the business need on why the project is initiated and what factors affect our decision.
- Identify stakeholders even before scheduling to avoid surprises and disappointments during the project life cycle.
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We need to then define the product, understanding what we are going to develop. It has two steps.
- Scope
- Quality
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Work breakdown structure: WBS – breaking down the full scope into smaller manageable elements
- Not really breaking down tasks/ work.
- It is a hierarchical list.
- Helps in finding the gaps
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Are the project benefits short term? Or a long term?
- If long term, many aspects like scalability, compatibility etc. to be taken into consideration.
- Short term ones might not require to be exhaustive. For e.g. if the project is about providing data extracts to business over a period of 6 months, we should not be much concerned about technology upgrades, incompatibility issues etc. We can just monitor to keep track of any changes.
- These are called quality expectations.
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Acceptance criteria: Following standards, guidelines, identify change in scope during planning due to various reasons like technology feasibility etc.
- All this information is to be added to WBS dictionary. WBS dictionary can be a part of WBS document or a separate document
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Identify how to measure cost and time.
- Use tools like MS project or simple excel to list down high level activities and their timelines.
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All the low level elements should now be split into activities.
- Activities are the actual representation of resources, time and amount of work to be done.
- This information is to be added into the MS project or the excel tracker to identify the critical path.
- We should have our acceptable schedule of our project now.
- Cost of the project is calculated based on the resources, time and amount work to be done.
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Start risk and issue logs. Be proactive in identifying risks and manage them.
- What is the impact of the risk and probability (of occurrence)?
- Prioritise based on both the above and check where the resources are to be allocated in order to mitigate the risk (reduce impact or probability or both).
- The risks and their mitigation might add to project costs, schedule and resources and add new risks as well.
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Communication is one of the most important task of the project manager.
- Communication with teams, stakeholders, 3rd parties
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Training, motivation, rewards and recognition are some of the aspects of resource management.
- Budget for all these are to be planned and will be part of project costs.
- We need to baseline time, cost, scope according to PMBOK
- Metrics: planned vs actuals, forecast planning to be performed.
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In case of issues, root cause and preventive actions are important than being reactive.
- These corrective and preventive actions might fall under a change request. So project manager should be cautious on these actions.
- Once a change request is added to scope, plans, activities are to be revisited and re-baselined.
- This is one form of change request.
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Change request (CR) has many forms and might impact any of the knowledge areas
- Stakeholders, scope, cost, time, quality, procurement, risk, communication and HR
- Once a CR is approved, the CR plan is to be integrated with the baselined plan.
Technical Blog 