Purpose:
Establish and maintain plans that define project activities.
Objective:
Expectations for estimating the planning parameters, making internal and external commitments, and developing the plan for managing the project.
Description:
One of the keys to effectively managing a project is project planning. The Project Planning process involves the following activities:
- Developing the project plan
- Interacting with relevant stakeholders appropriately
- Getting commitment to the plan
- Maintaining the plan
Planning includes estimating the attributes of work products and tasks, determining the resources needed, negotiating commitments, producing a schedule, and identifying and analyzing project risks. Iterating through these activities may be necessary to establish the project plan. The project plan provides the basis for performing and controlling project activities that address commitments with the project’s customer.
The project plan is usually revised as the project progresses to address changes in requirements and commitments, inaccurate estimates, corrective actions, and process changes. Specific practices describing both planning and replanning are contained in this process area.
The term “project plan” is used throughout this process area to refer to the overall plan for controlling the project. The project plan can be a standalone document or be distributed across multiple documents. In either case, a coherent picture of who does what should be included. Likewise, monitoring and control can be centralized or distributed, as long as at the project level a coherent picture of project status can be maintained.
For product lines, there are multiple sets of work activities that would benefit from the practices of Project Planning. These work activities include the creation and maintenance of the core assets, developing products to be built using the core assets, and orchestrating the overall product line effort to support and coordinate the operations of the inter-related work groups and their activities.
In Agile environments, performing incremental development involves planning, monitoring, controlling, and re-planning more frequently than in more traditional development environments. While a high-level plan for the overall project or work effort is typically established, teams will estimate, plan, and carry out the actual work an increment or iteration at a time. Teams typically do not forecast beyond what is known about the project or iteration, except for anticipating risks, major events, and large-scale influences and constraints. Estimates reflect iteration and team specific factors that influence the time, effort, resources, and risks to accomplish the iteration. Teams plan, monitor, and adjust plans during each iteration as often as it takes (e.g., daily). Commitments to plans are demonstrated when tasks are assigned and accepted during iteration planning, user stories are elaborated or estimated, and iterations are populated with tasks from a maintained backlog of work.
Entrance Criteria:
- Spreadsheet Programs
- Estimating Models
- Project Planning and Scheduling Packages
Exit Criteria:
- Work Breakdown Structure
- Project Plan
- Data Management Plan
- Stakeholder Involvement Plan
Process and Procedures:
Tailoring Guidelines:
Organizations may choose to purchase a project planning process and procedures rather than to develop them. Using the Causal Analysis and Resolution process, they can tailor the process to fit their organization.
Special expertise, equipment, and facilities in project planning may be
required. Special expertise in project planning can include the following:
- Experienced estimators
- Schedulers
- Technical experts in applicable areas (e.g., product domain, technology)
Process Verification Record(s):
- Project Data Library Structure
- Stored By: [PMO Director]
- Project Attribute Estimates
- Stored By: [PMO Director]
- Risk Impacts and Probability of Occurrence
- Stored By: [PMO Director]
Measure(s):
- Number of revisions to the plan
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- Frequency of Submission: <?>
- Cost, schedule, and effort variance per plan revision
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- Schedule for development and maintenance of program plans
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References:
Create These Seven Elements of a Quality Management Plan
The Quality Management Plan describes how you will ensure the client’s quality requirements are achieved. It is the place to describe the processes and activities that will be put into place to ensure that quality deliverables are produced. The Quality Management Plan also helps you understand when deliverables are complete and correct.
The quality requirements are unknown when the Quality Management Plan is created. Still, it would be best if you described the processes and techniques you will use to uncover the quality requirements and verify that the requirements are met. The information in the Quality Management Plan includes:
- Roles and responsibilities. Describe the different quality-related roles on the project. The project manager has overall responsibility, but you may have other roles assisting. These could include quality auditors, third-party testing specialists, inspectors, etc.
- Completeness and correctness criteria. The completeness and correctness criteria aim to work with the customer upfront to define what it means for a deliverable to be considered complete and correct. Then, when you meet those terms, you expect the customer to be satisfied. In other words, there should be no surprises.
- Quality requirements process. Describe the process you will use to uncover and validate the customer’s expectations for quality. This is generally going to be a part of the requirements-gathering process.
- Quality assurance activities. Quality assurance activities focus on the processes used to build the solution. They can be validated by a functional manager, business sponsor, or a third-party reviewer. It would help if you described this project’s major quality assurance activities and techniques.
- Quality control activities. Quality control activities are performed continually throughout a project to verify that project deliverables are acceptable. It would help if you described the major quality control activities and techniques that will be used on this project.
- Quality standards. List any quality standards that the company or organization has previously defined that this project will follow.
Quality tools. List any quality-related tools that your project will utilize.
The Quality Management Plan is where you think beforehand about how you will understand the customers’ expectations for quality and how you will deliver to that expectations. Once the project starts, this Plan guides how you will manage quality throughout the project.
