More Flashcards
BAC
Budget at Completion - BAC is the budget set in the beginning of the project
EAC
Estimate at Completion - EAC is the estimate of what we now expect the project to cost based on the current numbers
CPI
Cost Performance Index - CPI is a measure of how well the project is doing in terms of spending the project budget
A CPI<1 means the project is over budget for the work completed at this point in the project
SV
Schedule Variance SV=EV-PV
A negative variance means the project is behind.
SPI
Schedule Performance Index = EV/PV
An SPI<1 means less work than planned has been completed at this point in the project
What are the 3 characteristics of a project?
distinct end and beginning, aims to produce a product or service, finished when specific objectives are met.
What are the 3 characteristics of ongoing work?
ongoing, repetitive, objectives change
Progressive elaboration
Iterative approach where planning occurs in cycles rather than upfront. Projects that use it typically do some planning, some execution, some monitoring and controlling, and then repeat the cycle
Scope creep
the addition of features to a project; caused by perfectionism, misunderstandings, placating stakeholders, and unexpected scope related issues
Value analysis or value engineering
This technique asks “How can we decrease cost on the project while maintaining the same scope or quality?”
CV
Cost Variance CV=EV-AC
The difference between what you budgeted and what you have spent so far.
A CV < 0 means costs are higher than budgeted.
EV
Earned Value EV=BAC*Work Completed/Total work Planned
EV=cost of the planned work completed as of a reporting date
AC
Actual costs CV=EV-AC
AC=cost of the actual work completed as of a reporting date
Portfolio
Collection of programs, projects, and ongoing work. The projects may not be related
Program
Group of related projects and ongoing work
Project
temporary body of work that produces a unique product or service and has a definitive end point.
Difference between a functional and an operations manager
Functional managers provide management oversight of a functional (finance, HR, IT) or business unit where operational managers focus on ensuring business operations are efficient. Operations managers aren’t required but are often used in production lines to increase efficiency.
Strong vs. Weak vs. Balanced matrix
in a strong matrix organization power rests with the PM, in a weak one power rests with the functional manager (ex. engineering manager). In a balanced matrix power is shared equally between both individuals.
knowledge vs. competency vs. performance
Knowledge = what you know (keyword is "aware" or "know") Competency = what kind of person you are (keyword is "able") Performance = what can you do (keyword="have")
process group vs. phase
PMI defines 5 process groups that help organize the 42 processes of program management. Every process is assigned a process group according to whether the purpose is initiating, planning, executing, monitoring & controlling, or closing the project. A phase is a grouping of project activities that may be organized as such so the project can be evaluated. Phases are separated by exit gates or kill points where someone evaluates whether the project should proceed to the next phase.
Perform Quality Planning vs. Perform Quality Assurance vs. Perform Quality Control
Perform Quality Planning is focused on defining quality for the project and how we will achieve it. Perform Quality Assurance is an executing process that focuses on ensuring the team is following the planned PROCESS. Perform Quality Control examines WORK RESULTS & DELIVERABLES to make sure they are correct and meet the planned level of quality.
Monitor & Control Process Group
Measures the work results against the plan and makes adjustments if variances exist
Charter
The document that formally starts the project. It is typically issued by the sponsor and names the PM. It usually contains high level project reqts, high level milestones, summary level preliminary budget. It authorizes the PM to expend organizational resources to accomplish the project objective.
Project Scope
All the work to be performed in the project. It is documented in the Project Scope statement and the WBS.
Plurality
Largest group, but not large enough to be a majority (>50%)
Configuration management
managing changes to the deliverables of a project; involves version control
Configuration status accounting
tracking the status of the project at all times; most PMs use PM software or a log to do this.
Decomposition
A technique for progressively breaking down the scope into smaller and smaller components. It is performed on the WBS and typically stops when the decomposed components are small enough to be assigned and estimated for time and cost. These components are later decomposed into schedule activities.
Project Scope Statement
A broad written description of the project aimed at stakeholders. It contains a description, deliverables, product acceptance criteria, project constraints, project assumptions, and project exclusions.
Requirements Documentation
Docs that describe how individual requirements meet the business need for the project. They can start vague, but before they can be baselined they need to be unambiguous (measurable, testable), traceable, complete, consistent, and acceptable to stakeholders. There are tons of these: ex. stakeholder and communication reqts, reporting reqts, acceptance criteria, etc.
Organizational Process Assets
All historical info or knowledge a company has at its disposal that can be used to help future projects. Ex. templates, forms, research results, WBS, quality standards, benchmarks, contracts, lessons learned, software tools, KBs, etc. Anything your company owns or has developed that can help you on a current or future project.
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
A hierarchical breakdown of the projects scope, including all components of the work that must be done. It shows the relationship between deliverables and work packages. You develop the WBS progressively during rolling wave planning and the projects cost estimate is also refined progressively as well.
WBS dictionary
A document in which every detail of the WBS is described in detail. It contains work descriptions, milestones, resource reqts, dependencies, etc.
Perform Integrated Change Control
Monitoring and Controlling process where all requested change requests and unrequested changes are reviewed according to the change control system. It focuses on changes to the product or service as well as organizational process assets that endure past the project.
Enterprise Environmental Factors
Any factor outside the project’s control that influences the project. Ex. organizational attitudes, org structure, culture, reporting relationships, govt, the economy, laws, characteristics of stakeholders, organizations appetite for risk, etc.
Project Management Plan
The plan for how the project will be managed. It is a formal approved doc composed of other planning management docs. aka Project Plan
Work Performance Information
Performance data collected during various controlling processes, analyzed in context and integrated based on relationships across areas. Among other things, WPI includes deliverable status, implementation status of change reports, forecasted estimates to complete.
Scope baseline
Scope baseline=
Project Scope Statement+WBS+WBS dictionary
Risk register
Doc containing all identified risks relevant to the project. It is a component of the project plan, contains info about each risk and is updated throughout the project.
Requirements Traceability Matrix
A grid that links product reqts from their origin to the deliverables that satisfy them. Grid typically lists the reqt, then columns for Business needs/opportunities/goals/objectives, WBS, Project objectives, test case, Product design, product development.
Earned Value Management (EVM)
The cost accounting technique of measuring work completed (earned value) against the plan (planned value).
To-Complete Performance Index (TCPI)
Index that indicates the performance the project would need to achieve to end on target. 1 is bad since you have to over-perform against your estimates to hit your target.
Contingency vs. Management Reserves
Money buffers built into the budget to help keep the budget on track. They are anticipated, but you don’t know how big they will be. They go into the cost baseline and the project budget. Management contingency reserves is money built into the budget for scope or cost changes (ex. emergency). Not put into the cost baseline, but they are put into the overall budget.
Bottoms-up cost estimating
Involves making separate estimates of the cost for each work package in the WBS. To determine the estimate you have to break the work packages down into activities, estimate the costs and then roll them up for each activity.
Baseline
original plan plus all approved changes
Schedule Baseline
The original schedule approved by the customer, sponsor, and project manager
Cost Baseline
the approved version of the time phased budget excluding management reserves. By time phased, I mean you know when it will be spent in the project.
Focus group
Technique for guiding interactive discussion and collecting reqts on an aspect of a project.
Nominal group technique
A technique where brainstormed ideas are voted upon and sorted by priority
Delphi Technique
A technique where you gather expert judgment without bias by surveying the experts, compiling the results and then surveying them again without any knowledge of participants opinions
idea or mind mapping
A technique of diagramming ideas and creating meaningful associations in a graphical format.
affinity diagram
A technique where ideas generated from any other technique are grouped into similar buckets.
project constraints
imposed limits (e.g. budget and time limitations)
product acceptance criteria
the goals that must be met in order for stakeholders to give their stamp of approval on the product.
Decomposition 8/80 rule
80 too big
Triple constraints
budget (cost), scope, schedule (time)
Rolling wave planning
AKA Progressive elaboration
Idea is that your project may not require that you decompose to a lower level of some phases until later in the project (when more info is available), while fully decomposing levels that need to be done soon
Leads and Lags
Leads allow successor activities to be accelerated by enabling them to be started and completed sooner (ex. can begin editing before all the writing is done). Lags are delays that could cause the activity to be started and finished later (e.g. editor is only available 5D after catalog is complete).
Discrete vs. Apportioned effort
A Discrete effort is an activity that can be performed by one person or a defined project team in a fixed amount of time. An apportioned effort is one where the work can’t be easily divided into separate measurable parts (ex. the quality assurance function which goes on throughout the development phase).
Milestones
A notable event in a project. Often used to trigger events (e.g. monitoring and controlling processes, closing processes, or customer invoicing).
How do you determine the Productivity rate?
You determine the productivity rate needed for parametric estimating by using analogous estimating and estimating judgment.
Reserve analysis
A technique used to determine how much cost or schedule reserve is appropriate for a given activity, WBS node, or time or funding category. You add buffer to a micro or macro level.
Duration vs. Effort
Duration and Effort are not the same. Duration is how long the activity is expected to take with the labor available.
Effort is the amount of labor or total # of billable hours because of resources involved and is used when calculating costs.
histogram
stacked bar chart to show the frequency of something vs. time. Frequency is on the Y axis.
Schedule compression
A technique that uses fast tracking or crashing to bring activities back on schedule without changing the project scope.
Fast tracking
Performing project activities on the critical path in parallel that would have been performed in sequence. It is most often the discretionary dependencies that are discarded to do this, but it increases risk.
Crashing
A technique that involves applying additional resources to one or more activities in order to complete the work more quickly. It usually increase cost more than risk and can lead to diminishing returns as resource allocation passes optimal levels. Ex. bringing in additional resources or working overtime.
TCPI
TCPI=To Complete Performance Index - Index that indicates the performance the project would need to achieve to end on target. >1 is bad since you have to over-perform against your estimates to hit your target.
Basis of estimates
a record of how you derived the estimates for activity cost estimates
Variance analysis as used in EVM
Variance Analysis as used in Earned Value Management compares actual vs. planned performance. The most commonly analyzed variances are cost and schedule variances.
Trend analysis
Technique examining project performance over time to determine whether performance is improving or deteriorating
Earned Value Performance
Earned Value Performance compares the performance measurement baseline to actual schedule and cost information.
Quality
Conformance to product and project specifications
Quality vs. Grade
Quality is the degree to which characteristics meet requirements. Grade is a category assigned to products with similar functional uses, but different technical characteristics. Whereas a quality that doesn’t meet requirements is a problem, a lower grade may not.
Precision
consistency of the measurement of multiple procedures under the same conditions. It is often characterized in terms of standard deviation from a norm. A precise process is one where there is a small deviation from the norm.
Accuracy
the closer a measurement is to the acceptable value
ISO 9000
set of international guidelines and quality measurement standards used to establish quality management systems.
Six Sigma
A disciplined quality process that strives to develop near perfect products and services. It measures how many defects are in a process and then systematically figures out how to eliminate them.
Continuous Improvement
An ongoing effort to improve organizational quality and performance. Its aim is to improve customer sat through continuous improvement to products, services, or processes. Uses Plan-Do-Act-Check cycle
Failure mode and effect analysis
An analytical procedure in which each potential failure mode in every component of a product is analyzed. A failure mode can be analyzed by itself, or in combination with other modes, to determine its effect on the reliability of the component.
Design review
A management technique used to evaluate proposed designs. Designs are reviewed to ensure they can be produced and maintained, can perform successfully, and meet customer requirements.
Voice of the customer
A planning technique used to provide products, services, and results that truly reflect customer requirements. It does this by translating customer requirements into appropriate technical requirements for each phase of product development.
TQM
Total Quality Management
TQM emphasizes that processes rather than people generate quality problems. TQM requires that quality be managed and that quality improvement should be a continuous and an integral part of how a business works.
Cost of quality
The cost of quality is the total cost to produce the product or service of the project according to the quality standards. These costs include all planned and unplanned work needed to meet the product requirements. It also includes the costs of work performed because of nonconforming quality requirements. Three costs associated with the cost of quality are prevention costs, appraisal costs, and failure costs.
internal vs. external failure costs
Internal failure costs are costs incurred before the product or service is delivered to the customer. External failure costs are incurred after it has been released to the customer.
Control charts
Used to monitor performance relative to baselines. Most often used in manufacturing to compare repetitive processes to a baseline. In quality you look at where you actuals fall in relation to the goal, upper/lower control, and upper/lower spec limits. Then you adjust your plans to bring the item into control (ex. cut costs by reducing one of your quality control checks).
DOE
DOE (Design of Experiments) is a statistical method for determining factors affecting a process and the end results of that process
Matrix diagrams
Used to compare the efficiency and effectiveness of alternatives based on the relationship between two criteria
Force field analysis
Used to examine the reasons for and behind a decision
Perform Quality Assurance
Perform Quality Assurance involves auditing the Plan Quality Assurance you did during the planning phase. It is often handled by someone other than the team Quality Assurance team.
Quality audit
Aims to uncover any policies or procedures that aren’t efficient or aren’t yielding the results they should. They look at signoff forms, defect logs, progress reports, etc. Quality audits don’t only identify what has gone wrong, they identify what is going right. They identify best practices, share good practices, and improve processes.
attribute sampling
a product produces an attribute or not
variables sampling
results are compared against a continuous scale
correlation
relationship between independent and dependent variables
Cause and effect Diagram
aka Ishikawa diagram or fishbone diagram
Cause-and-effect diagrams identify the various factors that contribute to a problem or risk. You use these diagrams to identify the main categories of causes for a risk, and then to drill down into specific causes. Further analysis of each of the causes – through questions like “why?” and “how?” – is used to uncover the underlying reasons for them.
Pareto diagram
Pareto charts are an improvement on the histogram in that rank results based on the frequency of the distribution
Pareto principle
most of the defects in a project are caused by a few problems; 80% of defects are caused by 20% of possible sources (also known as the 80/20 principle)
RACI chart
Responsible Accountable Consult Inform
R - does the work, A - signs off, C - has info, I - needs to be informed
Ideally only one person is Responsible for each activity and one person is Accountable for each activity. Should not be the same person since the Accountable person is approving the work of the person responsible.
Cardinal vs. Ordinal Scale
Cardinal - 0.0 to 1.0; Ordinal - low med high
Impact Definition table
Defines how impact is defined for each objective. It uses an ordinal scale
Probability and Impact matrix
Defines how impact is defined for each objective. It uses an ordinal scale with impact on the X axis and probability on the Y axix
SWOT analysis
Strengths Weakness Opportunities Threats
Brainstorm the top ideas for each section in a grid. OT portion is external. Ask yourself do you have any control over the factor or not. If not, external:
Influence diagrams
Influence diagrams graphically map out a situation, showing how the factors of the situation may influence each other. This is useful for root cause analysis – especially where a problem is due to a bad decision – because it helps the project manager identify which factors influenced a decision.
Qualitative risk analysis
Qualitative risk analysis relies on the subjective judgment of stakeholders and therefore subject to bias. Bias may cause you to overlook critical risks or cause you to focus on improbable risks. Use an impact definition table in your risk management plan to eliminate bias in your analysis.
Three types of cost benefit analysis in a business case
IRR, NPV, ROI study
Staffing management plan
Describes the timing and methods that will be used to meet human resource reqts.
control chart
tool used in the quality management process to determine whether a process is in or out of control. It gauges this by providing mean and control limit info.
run chart
Used to track quality problem trends over time (ex. defects/month). By plotting this over time you can tell whether quality is improving or decreasing. It doesn’t tell you the cause of problems.
Projectized organization
Project manager has complete authority, they are both the manager of the project and the people. More commonly found in consulting organizations.
corrective action vs. preventative action vs. defect repair
corrective action - any change to bring future results in line with the plan; preventative action - changes made to avoid the occurrence of a problem; defect repair - fix when a product or service does not meet spec.
Process
A set of inputs, tools, and techniques used to produce one or more specific outputs for the project. There are 42 process of project management and 516 inputs, tools, and techniques.
Work Performance Data
The raw information and measurements identified during activities performed to carry out the project work. Examples include reported percent of work physically completed, quality technical performance measures, start and finish dates of schedule activities, number of change requests, number of defects, actual costs, actual durations, etc.
Work Performance Reports
The physical or electronic representation of work performance information compiled in project docs, intended to generate decisions, raise issues, actions, or awareness. Examples include status reports, memos, justifications, information notes, electronic dashboards, recommendations, and updates.
