1.3 Planning and Scheduling

Initiating. Our next topic will be the initiating process group. Remember there are five process groups. Initiating is one of these. It’s the process group that deals with starting the whole project off. We’re going to define this thing and get this project rolling. Away we go. There are two key elements in the initiating process, and then there are some other things that are nice to have in here as well. Two absolute key necessities in here, first we have to figure out who the Stakeholders are for the project. Who are all the people that are surrounding this project? Who are all the people that will be involved in this project, people that will be affected by this project, people that have some vested interest in this project? Those are going to be our Stakeholders. As we start to talk about our stakeholders we’ll have one group that we may pull out and say this group is the Customer. This person or group. Customer is the only person or group out of the entire bunch of Stakeholders that we’re actually going to hand the project over to. And give them the project when it’s all done. They’re a subset of stakeholders. They are still stakeholders. Stakeholders could include your project team, the project manager, the project sponsor. All those people are stakeholders. Sometimes we’ll put special names on some of the stakeholders just to clarify their role along the way and customers would be one of those. These are the people that will actually receive the deliverables of the project. The Project Charter’s the second thing that we have to do in the initiating group. We put together a Project Charter. To start a Project Charter, you really only need two things in there. You need the name of the project, and that says this organization has decided to do this project. We’ve formal sanctioned this project and we will undertake this project and support it. And the second thing, the project manager’s name that says this person has been selected to manage this project and they have been given the authority to use organizational resources to do this project. Then there are some other things that go into the project charter as well as the project moves along. And it gets to be the Project Charter is really an expanded table of contents or just a small summary view of our whole project plan. The project plan’s going to include the work breakdown structure, the schedule, the spending plan, the resource plan, our cost management plan, our risk management plan, our communication plan. The project plan covers a lot of things. The charter is just that high level document that’s just a few pages that says this is what this project is all about. Anybody can pick that up, get a good idea about the project. It’s not all the details of the project, that will be included in the project plan. It’s a Project Charter. It’s an Agreement between all of the involved parties along the way. So the project manager, the sponsor, the customers, any executive groups, key stakeholders, I’ll say yeah, this is what the project is. One location for all of this overview information. It’s a Definition of the project. It’s a high level definition, shows us what the project is all about. And it’s a Guide for project activities. As the project manager is moving along with the project, we can always go back to the charter and say, am I on track? Am I really doing what I’m supposed to be doing around here?”. We said one of the key things along with the Project Charter, and actually stakeholders, is one of the fields that you would put into a project chart. Let’s talk a little bit about stakeholders and let’s take a look at an Example Project. We’re going to expand our current sports stadium on a university campus. So there’s a number of things involved in doing this. We’re going to put in new turf, we’re going to put all new lighting into the whole stadium. We’re going to put a lot more seating in the stadium, and if we can find a little bit of money, we may actually even put some sky boxes in. Close some of those seats in, put some sky boxes in. We’re going to put in a new parking lot, and we’re going to put in a brand new scoreboard. Right now, this university does not have an electronic scoreboard. They have two students that just go hang up different numbers as the scores change up there and now all of a sudden we’re gonna have a nice, fancy new electronic scoreboard that does instant replays. This is gonna be a real big improvement. What I’d like you to do is just take moment and think about stakeholders. So on a piece of paper just list at least three people or groups that you think might have some interest in this kind of a project, or be involved in getting this project done, or might be somehow affected by this project. Just take a moment, jot some of those people or groups down. See what you think that might look like. Who did you put on your list? This is just an example. This isn’t the be all, end all list. This is an example of some of the things you might’ve put on there, Students, Faculty, University President, Athletic Department, Home wners around the stadium, all the City departments that have be involved, and all the traffic coming in and out of here. We’re putting in a new parking lot around here. There’s going to be all kinds of things going on. Probably some permits we’ll have to work with, all kinds of things are gonna be happening. This is just an example of who some of the stakeholders might be. What you have to do in your project is figure out who the stakeholders are, analyze them and find out who the key ones are and make sure you work with through the entire project. This is an example of a Project Charter. And Scope Statement. This is just a list, a little spreadsheet, that shows what goes into a Charter, what goes into a Scope Statement. Because the Project Management Institute lays these out as two different documents. We’re gonna talk about a Scope Statement now as well. And the key thing in the Scope Statement we’ll discuss will be the deliverables for the project. These are the two things that PMI says go into each one of these documents. What you find in reality, in most organizations, there’s not two documents, there’s one. This is all rolled up into one document called either a Charter, or a Scope, or some other kind of name for these things. All the information that’s contained here, many times is just in one document, instead of two. It doesn’t make any difference if it’s one, two documents, three, six. Who cares? As long as you have the information some place. That’s the important bit. This has to be discussed, decided, there’s a lot of decisions to be made here, and these kinds of information just need to be documented. Let’s talk about a Scope Statement. Scope Statement just talks about how big the project is, what the deliverables are. We’re going to look at an example project again and we’re gonna look again at our stadium. So, if we look at what’s going on with this stadium. These things are involved in the scope of the project. These things are all in the product’s scope of the project. Remember, we’re not talking about all the work that has to be done yet. We’re just talking about the things that are going to be provided by this project. So these are, you know, this is beginning to be a list of deliverables here. One of the key things that comes out of the Scope Statement will be the list of deliverables for the project. So if we look at the new turf, the new lighting, the new seating, the new parking lot, the new score board. What do you think some of the major deliverables are? List at least 3 of the deliverables on a sheet of paper, 3 of the deliverables for this project. Well, what did you end up listing? We have New turf, lighting, scoreboard, seating, parking lot. Those are five clear deliverables. There may be some subsets under these deliverables. And there may be some additional deliverables we decide to put into this project that we haven’t discussed yet. But these are the key things. This is really what this project is all about. These are the key deliverables for this project.