L3 Flashcards
How do you prioritise stakeholders?
Do a power / interest map.
Are the stakeholders on a power/interest map fixed?
No, they change from project to project, and may also over time.
What are the project trade offs stakeholders must make?
Time
Cost
Quality
What is the time, cost, quality triangle called?
The iron triangle.
How do you ask stakeholders to give you their priorities? (When they obvs want cheapest, high quality, short time)
Give them a project priority matrix and tick off what they will constrain, what they want to enhance, and what loss they will accept (e.g. big budget)
Are time, cost, and quality the only measures of project success?
No, it depends who you ask. A team member might want a nice working environment, a military project might want secrecy etc
How do we measure success beyond time, quality, cost?
Use a balanced scorecard.
-Financial requirements: short/med/long term return on investment
-customers/suppliers: direct/indirect requirements
-internal processes: improve business processes, impact on staff satisfaction
-innovation/learning: learning outcomes of the project
How do we quantify what stakeholders want?
Must be measurable:
TCQ: agreed timeframe with milestones, agreed budget, quality conforms to specs.
Others: do a pilot study, do benchmarking, do modelling e.g. model how many shop servers you need.
What is M&E?
Monitoring and evaluation.
Conventional is done by project managers etc.
Participatory is done by local people, staff etc.
How to decide which version of M&E to go for?
Go to power/interest map, see which stakeholders you have.
If it’s a first-timer project, you want to engage stakeholders (participatory). If it’s PBN, you can use conventional.
How to organise what/when to communicate with stakeholders?
Use a communication plan, especially in larger scale projects.
What are the elements of project outline planning?
- Concept development (develop basic project idea)
- Scope development (build a plan around the idea)
- Product overview (spec list)
- Process overview (risk, stakeholder priority, communication) more important for first-timers
- Detailed plan
How do we screen project ideas? (4)
Marketing studies
Return on investment
Strategy/mission
Feasibility
What goes into good concept development processes?
- allow employees time for exploration
- important to protect ownership
- encourage rapid prototyping
- involve senior management
What goes into bad concept development processes?
- being overly restrictive hinders creativity
- having no processes at all!
What is scope creep?
When the scope of the project changes as time goes on. We want to prevent this!
How do we prevent scope creep?
Decompose the project into stages. For the project to pass to the next stage it has to go through a gate.
What do we look for at the gates in the stage-gate model?
- have 80% of the aims been realised?
- do you have the resources to do the project? (Feasibility)
- do better alternatives exist now on the market? (Cut your losses)
- organisational change (new CEO and the project now doesn’t match the strategy)
- financial jeopardy
What does a project charter aim to address?
What, why, who, when, how?
It’s the contractual bible made after planning the project to refer back to.
What goes into a project charter?
Sponsor name
PM’s responsibility and authority
Exec summary + background info
Scope: requirements + deliverables
Business case
Time: schedules
Resources + constraints
Stakeholder plan
Evaluation methods
Risk management + assumptions
How to break down a project into activities?
- list major tasks
- break them down into detailed tasks
- continue until all activities are listed
- determine task dependencies
Activity features
- some must happen in sequence, others simultaneously
- some must happen when and how
- all uncertain and subject to risk
Why do we want an activity map?
It makes everything easier:
- we can estimate resources/allocation
- we can schedule
- we can track (better progress estimate)
What is a work package?
The smallest piece of work that a project has.
It’s a subset of a project that is assignable to specific resources and produces a deliverable.
How do we break down projects into work packages?
- Functional breakdown
Split into departments eg finance, IT - Activity breakdown
- Physical breakdown
Look at major components eg hardware, software
After deconstructing a project into work packages, what do we do?
Compilation
Use critical path analysis and Gantt charts to plan how the work packages are organised.
Work packages should be small enough that…
The same resources work on them throughout.
You can easily track their progress.
Work packages should be large enough that…
It ends in a verifiable outcome.
They have distinct start times + resources.
How can we use an activity plan to create a work breakdown structure?
List the deliverables, measures of accomplishment, key constraints/assumptions. This helps assist hierarchical planning.
How do decide how much detail (layers) we have in a work breakdown structure?
When granularity makes things easy!
- reporting period (need to have progress to report to management. If you see them monthly, WPs should be <1 month)
- progress measurement should be easy
- resource estimation should be easy
- task details become clearer
- should have 3-5 levels
- WPs should have 8-80hrs of length
What’s a tool to communicate with stakeholders what needs to be done?
RACI Matrix
Responsible, accountable, consult, inform
AKA Responsibility matrix
List tasks and assign RACI to each player involved
