“No matter how good the team or how efficient the methodology, if we’re not solving the right problem, the project fails.” – Woody Williams
Its critical to get your project prioritized after making the project charter. After which you can start the planning which will give information about stakeholders, scope, requirements, schedule, cost, quality, resources, communication, risk and procurement. Stakeholder and communication are partners. So are resources and procurement.
Clearly knowing the stakeholders along with requirements and a strong communication is half the battle won. Any project which has these three shaky, will most likely miss the scope, schedule, cost or quality parameter.
Gathering requirements calls for spending time with all stakeholders. The developers will be a better judge of what the broken-down structure be like. The project manager along with developers will be better in grouping, sequencing and estimating the activities. Its important to accept that a new project may not have the guiding light of historic data. It is better to break the requirement in to as many smaller activities as possible so that testing for success is faster and it also helps in estimating the risks. This will also help in knowing if we are moving closer to the goal/ objective. If we know what the objective is then planning for quality also becomes easier.
Important
Stakeholder Engagement Plan, Scope Management Plan, Collect Requirements, Define Scope, Create WBS, Schedule Management Plan, Define Activities, Sequence Activities, Estimate Activity Durations, Develop Schedule, Cost Management Plan, Estimate Costs, Determine Budget, Quality Management Plan, Resource Management Plan, Estimate Activity Resources, Communications Management Plan, Risk Management Plan, Identify Risks, Perform Qualitative Risk Analysis, Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis, Plan Risk Responses, Procurement Management Plan, Requirement Traceability Matrix, Brainstorming, Voting and the Nominal Group Technique, Prototyping (Storyboards, wireframes, models and maps), Prioritization (MoSCoW, Cost/Benefit, CD3), Decomposition (incl WBS, WBSD), Project Scope Baseline: Statement, WBS, WBSD, Work Packages, Types of Estimating: Three point, Analogous, Parametric, Bottom up, Critical Path Method (Forward and backward pass), Leads and Lags, Precedence Diagramming Method ROM, Budget and Definitive Estimates, Contingency and Management Reserves, Earned Value Analysis (EVA), The Cost of Quality, Responsibility Assignment Matrix and RACIs, OBS (Organisational Breakdown Structure) versus RBS (Resource Breakdown Structure) and Product Breakdown Structure, Team Charter, Communication Models, Communication (Skills, Methods), Risk Categories, Risk Register, SWOT Analysis, Probability and Impact Matrix, Decision Tree Analysis, Strategies for Threats versus Strategies for Opportunities, Types of Contracts: Fixed Price Contracts versus Cost-reimbursable versus Time and Material, Advertising versus Bidder Conferences