Planning Process Group

Last week, I started narratives for the process groups, based on the Rita Mulcahy chart of process group steps, by beginning with Initiating a project. The next process group is planning.

For this process group, Mulcahy insists that there is a set order to these steps. Down the line, I’m sure I’ll figure out the logic to why these are in a set order.

So, after the project is initiated, one begins planning, and in a totally cyclical fashion, one begins Planning by planning how to plan. Seriously. Once the plan for planning is in place, you can finalize the requirements and begin creating the project scope statement (Mulcahy 43).

I would like to take a moment to express my surprise that the project scope statement is here in planning and not in initiating. While the project charter document discusses what the project will be including and not including, I suppose you can’t finalize the scope statement until the requirements are finalized, which happens in planning. I could see strong arguments made for the scope being in the Initiating phase, but oh well.

Following the completion of the scope, and I would suppose, building off of the analysis of the existing systems from initiation, you determine what will need to be purchased. Since making the determination to purchase some aspects trims those pieces out of the in-house work, after you decide what’s being bought, you can determine who is on the team, in-house. If you’re outsourcing the weaving, then the staff weavers don’t need to be part of the project team, nor do the loom-setup staff.

Now that you have staff, you can plan what work to assign them, in the WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) (Mulcahy 43). The WBS is everyone’s favorite part, at least if you work in my company, since it’s the most readily accessible portion of MS Project. More (much, much more) on this later.

So, tasks broken out in the WBS, you can create an activities list, and string them along into a network diagram. With the work diagrammed out, you can estimate the resource requirements to assign to the work, estimate the time needed to complete the tasks, and with time linked to tasks, you can see which tasks take longer and which define the critical path (the series of interrelated steps that define the total timespan of the project). If you take the critical path of 25 weeks, add it to a start date of tomorrow, you get a completion date, which means you have a schedule! Schedule x overhead= estimated expenses=budget.

So, now we have a network diagram, a schedule, and a budget, we have to plan to stick to this set of guidelines, so we build some quality metrics and processes to measure them. I like to think that this part should be easy, but it seems to be easy to skip, in my opinion.

Looking through these steps of the planning Process Group, I can kinda see phases going on here. Phase 1: Planning the Planning (the anal-retentive part of this). Phase 2: Building the execution plan (WBS, activities list, schedule, budget) (the concrete part of this). Phase 3: The Monitoring of the plan. Phase 4: Documenting the planning. We’re in Phase 3 at this point.

Notice how these 4 phases mirror the Project Lifecycle? It’s like a crazy project fractal.

Anyway, on to phase 3 of this: so, we have the quality metrics portion of this down. Now, if we don’t adhere to the quality metrics, we need a process improvement plan. Then, knowing how we are going to measure things, and what activities we want to complete, we can assign roles and responsibilities. This must be, logically, more than just “Bob, you’re responsible for overseeing the loom pattern development” but also, “Bob, you are responsible for submitting the weekly loom pattern development audit checklist that was documented in the quality metrics plan.” Responsibilities are more than just concrete tasks to get done.

Now that Bob needs to get the audit checklist to the project group, we need to plan the method of communicating that. So, communication plan (to monitor the quality metrics which monitors the work). Makes sense, right?

And with a communication plan, a quality plan with process improvements, a schedule, a budget, an activities list, a critical path, a network diagram, a WBS, and a list of things that needs to be purchased, what could possibly go wrong? Everything on the risk list that you can now develop and start planning for, too.

And, as we plan for risks, we need to tweak the WBS to account for Bob’s potential quality audit findings that could delay loom setup, which could delay prototype production, etc, so we have to repeat some of the above steps. Until we’re happy, we need to repeat phases 1-3.

Now, for phase 4, which is really the same as the Project Closing process group, as we’ll see later: we finalize the plans (including procurement documents), gather all the documents together, and get signoff from the stakeholders, and we’re done. Oh, no, wait, we’re done planning. Now, finally, we can kick off the project and get underway.

Posted by dgrimm100 on November 10, 2011

https://danspmblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/planning-process-group/