Planning process group
IE4240 project management
According to the PMBOK Guide, A Project Plan is defined as:
A formal, approved document used to guide both project execution and project
control. The primary uses of the project plan are to document planning assumptions
and decisions, facilitate communications among stakeholders, and document
approved scope, cost, and schedule baselines. A project plan may be summarized or
detailed.
Planning Process Group—Purpose
According to the PMBOK® Guide, the purpose of the Planning Process Group is to a) establish the
total scope of the project, b) define and refine the objectives, and c) develop a course of action to
achieve those objectives.
The output of the Planning Process Group is the Project Management Plan, which contains within it
the management plans for all the knowledge areas, and the project documents (schedule, budget,
risk register, etc.). The 5th Edition of the PMBOK® Guide has made sure that each knowledge area has
its associated planning process specifically named. Then, in the Integration Knowledge Area, the
process called Develop Management Plan should be understood to be an integration of all the
management plans of the other knowledge areas.
Planning Process Group – Relationship to the other Process Groups
Three things are worth noting about the Planning Process Group and its relationship to the
other Process Groups.
A. Planning Actually Starts in Initiating Process Group
In the initiating process group, high-level planning of the three basic constraints on a
project, the scope, time and budget, but at a high-level. These are then planned in more
detail in the Planning Process Group.
B. Executing Process Group Can Start Before Planning Process is complete.
If a project is complex, then the project may start to be executed after detailed planning of
only the initial phase of the project is complete, with details of the following phases coming
later on as the project progresses and more information and characteristics about the
project are understood. This is referred to as rolling-wave planning or progressive
elaboration.
C. Planning Process May be Revisited as a Result of Monitoring & Controlling
If during the monitoring & controlling process, significant changes are requested to the
project, then the i) Project Management Plan and the ii) Project Documents may need to be
revised to reflect these changes.
Besides the Planning Process Group interacting with the different process groups, there is
also interaction within the Planning Process Group between knowledge areas. For example,
risk management may uncover that the cost and schedule estimates are too optimistic, and
therefore require a revising of the cost and schedule management plan.
The Planning Process Group
https://www.pmchamp.com/planning-process-group-of-pmbok/
The Planning Process Group, among the 5 Process groups, has the most number of
processes (24), as defined in the PMBOK Guide (Fifth Edition).
It also has a particular sequence in which these processes must be done, which helps the
most in planning for a project. This is because each process has an impact on another
process, and consequently to the whole planning process. This proper sequence is not listed
in the PMBOK Guide. The guide merely lists all the process, required in each knowledge
area.
In real life projects, you don’t do things in the order of the knowledge areas as listed in
the PMBOK Guide.
Rather, you do things depending on the stage of the project – more like process groups –
You do planning once the project has been mooted, and kick started. Then once all the
planning is done, you move to Executing the project.
Among the 20+ processes just within the Planning Process Group, which one are you
supposed to do first? Is there a sequence to it? Yes, there is… but you won’t find it in
the PMBOK Guide.
Defining who is going to do what, and in what sequence, while doing planning is extremely
important.
For example, do you plan for the cost first, or the quality first, or plan out a schedule first? What
about outsourcing, contracting, procuring things from outside of the company? When should
that be planned? When do you estimate resources? When do you think about risk etc.?
Essentially, you need a way to structure things within planning…
Structure of Planning
Some things naturally go before others, and it is quite obvious… yet, we have seen countless
projects where the order is mixed up, and you get a poor project management plan. With a poor
quality of planning, the execution is bad too… and everyone suffers.
Get the structure of planning correct, and your project management plan will be so much
better!
First things first. Can you plan the time or cost if you don’t understand the scope of the work
correctly and completely? I’m sure you answered – No.
Take a good look at the diagram below; which maps the process relationships in the development
of the project management plan.
Develop PM
Plan
Define
Scope
Plan Scope
Management
Collect
Requirements
Create WBS
Activity
Definition
Activity Duration
Estimating
Plan Schedule
Management
Plan Cost
Management
Plan Risk
Management
Plan Human
Resource
Management
Cost Estimating
Cost Budgeting
Activity
Sequencing
Schedule
Development
Risk
Identification
Plan Quality
Management
Quantitative
Risk Analysis
Plan
Communications
Management
Qualitative
Risk Analysis
Plan Stakeholder
Management
Plan
Procurement
Management
Risk Response
Planning
Activity
Resource
Estimating
So the first thing is to understand how to go about planning and managing the project scope
completely. Thus, you should first plan to “plan out how the scope will be collected,
understood, defined completely”.
In the PMBOK Guide, under Scope Management Knowledge Area, the first process is “Plan
Scope Management Plan“. This is where you come up with a plan of how to define, clarify,
build and manage the scope. It acts as a guide when you or anyone has questions regarding
the scope of the project.
Keep in mind, we are NOT defining the scope of the project at this time, but defining and
crystallizing our plan of how to go about managing Scope of the project, so that there are no
surprises later on, and everyone knows what to do, and why we are doing it. This plan should
be so good that it shouldn’t have to get changed often. It should be able to handle changes to
the scope of the project, define the process to get exceptions approved, handle scope creep,
and handle change requests to the scope appropriately and completely.
Who will do this work of planning “The Overall Project Management Plan”?
Well, we need to assemble a core team, an smaller, initial team of people who will do this
planning, and help to define the requirements by talking/interviewing the customers. This is
usually done in Acquire the Project Team process, outlined under Human Resource
Management.
Once we have a good Scope Management Plan, we can then execute it to come up with
the detailed scope of the project.
The Scope Management process of Collect Requirements, with its 11 tools & techniques will
assist to grab the raw requirements of the project from our customers and key stakeholders.
We can then Define the Scope after going through a few rounds of “what should be done,
and what should be excluded“, based on time, budget, and other constraints. Then we can
show the final scope to the customer, and get them to agree on the detailed scope statement
of what would be actually delivered in the project.
Once the project & product scope is finalized, we can then begin the process of breaking
down this project scope into Phases, Sub-Projects, and smaller Work Packages. We keep on
doing this until we have broken each higher level work to the lowest level, where it can be
done in about a week, or less. This makes each work package small enough to be correctly
estimated, and later, managed and controlled, during execution. This breakdown of work is
done in the Create WBS process of Scope Management knowledge area.
Now we see the entire scope baseline clearly. We now must break the required work into
smaller activities, sequence them and come up with a high or medium level Network
Diagram. Not too detailed yet… but enough to begin estimating the people required. This is
done in Time Management Knowledge area.
We should now begin to get an idea of what kind of people are going to be needed for this
project, how many people may be needed, and whether they will be found internally, within
the organization, or externally.
If they can be found within the organization, you will then have to talk to them or their
managers to facilitate their availability to the project when the time comes to do their part.
If you are going to outsource some of the work, you can begin to work on the Procurement
Management Planning, and developing smaller Procurement Statement of Work, so you can
give it out to the potentials sellers, in their preparation for the bids. You can get some
indicative timeline and costing for the outsourced work.
Then begins the task of looking at the entire scope, the availability, experience, suitability of
the people to do the work, and begin the task of estimating how long it would take to do the
work, The project team assists in estimating the resources required, the estimated time
required to do each work package, each activity, and develop time and cost estimates. The
cost associated for each work – based on the people required, plus any equipment and
material needed for the activity is estimated.
Once time and cost estimates are established for each activity and work package in the
entire WBS, we should have a detailed breakdown of the schedule, costs and resource
requirements. Adding and rolling them up to a higher level can begin to give you the
overall timeline, and overall cost requirements. We can then look at the Critical Path of
the Project.
Based on available time, money, resources, and priorities of deliverables, some sections
can be moved around within the WBS and Network diagram. Once everyone on the project
team is happy with the end result, we can then begin to share this plan with the customer
and get their buy in too. This concludes with the schedule being base-lined in the Develop
Schedule process.
You don’t have to share your internal costs and resources so much with the end
customer… in case you are worried about the customer seeing your allocated resources or
the planned costs. Just share the timeline in the WBS and Network Diagram is good
enough. It also shows them how seriously you are taking the project, and how you are
working at the smallest level of detail, diligently. Nothing should be missed out.
With a customer’s nod, the Schedule can be base-lined. Internally, the costs can be nailed
down too. Of course you’ve got to think about the Contingency Reserve, and how much
funds are required for the day to day emergencies, for things popping up on the fly, for
which the project manager will have to spend some time and money.
You and your management will also have to work out a Management Reserve, the amount
that is kept for the unknown unknowns – new things that have not been thought of that
might change the course of the project. Keep some amount for this… Your management,
even when they have complete faith on you and your abilities to get the project done on
time and on budget, will usually keep some money aside for unexpected things cropping
up.
Don’t rejoice yet. We have only looked at the Scope of the project, Time required to do it,
and the Estimated Cost of the project based on the scope, time & resources. There are
several other areas, like Quality, Communication & Risk, which have to be factored in now.
Quality on the project does not happen automatically. You can not leave it to the individual
team members to deliver the quality they feel like. Quality on a project begins by
understanding the requirements & the quality required by the customer, and then taking
the time and money to deliver that quality.
First identify the quality requirements, the processes required to deliver that quality, how
will quality be measured, what quality metrics and standards are to be followed, how will
quality be audited (QA), how will quality be controlled (QC: Control Quality process) on the
project.
With a clear idea about quality standards, metrics, QA & QC requirements, we have to then
look at the additional resources required to do it. If existing people are doing the work, you
need to buffer in the required time for making sure that QA & QC are performed.
Most project managers only look at the time required to do the work, without including the
time for a Good Quality job – which would include quality audit & quality control time. You
may need to have a separate Quality Control team, as the people doing the work will often be
blind-sided – biased that their work is of high quality and does not require any testing.
If you added any activities, work packages, or increased the time or money for any activity as
a result of assessing and planning for quality, it would now alter your cost and time estimated
done earlier, and make them better, bringing your planning a notch higher.
Even the best laid plans get haywire. There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip. Good
project managers stay alert and expect the unexpected. This requires us to Plan for Risk (any
event that can happen in the life of the project, which may impact our project time, cost or
any other dimension).
A Risk Management Plan should be created, which would guide you and the team on how to
plan, analyze, manage and control risks, much before their happen. The biggest benefit is that
it brings focus to the things that can go wrong… this is an area that most people do not want
to think about… because of the fear of being labeled as “negative thinkers”. But it is timely to
take the cat out of the bag.
It should be healthy and proactive to talk about risk, and plan for it before
hand. PMI recommends you to start a Risk Register – a document that outlines each risk, its
probability of happening, and its impact, if it happens. This can then help to qualify the risk as
High, Medium or Low (Qualitative Risk Analysis process), and a numeric score can be
attached (Quantitative Risk Analysis process).
Finally, you can then proactively work out a Risk Response Strategy – what should be done if
the risk happens… what would be our strategy. Do we want to come up with an alternative
plan, probably change the course of action, come up with a mitigation plan (a plan to reduce
the probability or the impact of the risk), and contingency plan (in case the risk still happens).
Planning for Quality & Risk can be very enlightening. It can introduce new work packages,
add cost and alter the baselines considerably.
For example, if you notice that your team members are new or inexperienced, it can be a risk
that your project may not be able to deliver on time, or on the required quality. To overcome
this, you might want to send the team for training, to learn the correct way of doing things
beforehand. This requires time off from the project, and will cost you more. Plus, what’s the
guarantee that after you’ve sent them for training, they will not make mistakes. They may
make less mistakes, but it can still happen. You might then decide to put some of these
resources under a mentor or supervisor, to oversee the work more closely. This further
deepens your time, cost, and resource requirements.
As you can see, doing Quality Control, Monitoring for Risk, Sending people for training etc.
can have a huge impact on your project. Yet, it make take more time and money to do them.
Since the benefit may not be apparent right now, but the extra cost and time requirements are
more evident, there is a tendency to reduce or cut the time & money spent on Testing, Quality
Control, Risk Mitigation etc. This is a potential pitfall for real projects, and often the biggest
cause of failure.
Another area you need to look into now is the Communication with key stakeholders,
customers, team members, functional managers, PMO, management to name a few. The
time to communicate is often not factored at all in projects. It is assumed that
communication happens automatically, and that not much time is required to do it.
Most projects need a dedicated Communication Team, who would collate raw data, analyze
it, and convert it into information. Individual work packages are being completed, delays are
happening, and different people need information about the project right now. Some may
need summary information, some may need detail. Some need it daily, while others need it
weekly or monthly. Some can be sent by email, or dropped in share drives, while others may
need to be communicated in meetings, presentations.
It takes time to prepare and present the right information to the right person, in the right
format, and in the right frequency. Failure to do so creates a feeling of distrust with the
project and its manager.
This time and effort to Communicate has to be updated in the overall project plan and the
schedule and cost baselines need to be revised too.
Further, there are some iterative activities, which need time and effort. Things
like Conducting a Risk Re-assessment, Developing and Conducting a Process
Improvement activity, which will look at how things are being done, and look for ways to
improve them right now, before it gets too late. There is a continuous focus on Preventive
activities, Proactive actions and reduce reactive, costly defect repairs. The frequency, people,
time, resources, money to do these activities need to be planned in advance.
Planning also requires you to plan the Execution of the project. How to begin the execution,
how to manage the execution of the project, and how to Monitor & Control the project. Even
how to Close each project phase and then finally, close the entire project must be planned
out.
Some of this over-arching planning – for the different process groups is done as part
of Integration Management Knowledge Area, where plans for each phase are developed.
However, since planning a project well is half done, coming up with a complete, holistic
project management plan, which consists of individual plans to manage scope, time, cost,
quality, communication, human resources, risk, procurement and stakeholders is paramount
for project success.
As you have seen, the scope and schedule baselines were amended several times, to update
the impact created by quality management, risk management, communication
management, human resource management, procurement management, and stakeholder
management.
There has to be several iterations of all of these, before we can derive the complete project
plan, where the impact of activities done in one process has been handled in other
processes.
Once the entire project plan is completed, it should be presented to the Key Stakeholders,
Customers for review, and sign-off. If people do not agree on the plan itself from the very
beginning, it will be difficult to get their buy-in when you begin to execute the project.
After receiving sign-off, the project execution can be kicked-off, and you should celebrate
the signing-off of the project plan, and the beginning of execution with a big bang!
Wow! That’s how big and impactful Planning processes are. No wonder that 24 of the 47
processes in the PMBOK Guide, Fifth edition, belong to Planning process group. That’s more
than 50%.
Mastering these will give you good scores in the PMP exam, and give you enough clarity on
what to do and expect when doing actual projects.
So, in essence, you can look at the key processes in some order as “Plan how you will do the
planning” (haha)!!! The order (more or less) is given in the following:
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Finalize Requirements.
Develop Project Scope Statement
Determine Team
Create WBS & WBS Dictionary
Create & Sequence Activity List
Create Network Diagram
Estimate Resources
Develop time and cost estimate
Determine Critical Path
Develop Schedule
Develop Budget
Determine quality Requirements, processes, metrics, standards
Develop Process Improvement Plan
Determine Roles and Responsibilities
Develop Communication Plan
Risk Assessments
Iterations to go back and review all the other plans, as they impact each other
Plan What to Purchase
Prepare Procurement Documents
Finalize how to execute, monitor & Control
Develop final PM Plan, performance measurement baselines that are realistic
Gain Formal Approval of Management / Sponsor
Hold Kick-off meeting
Important Scope and Planning Mgt tasks to know!!!
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Create WBS & WBS Dictionary (WBS: Work Breakdown Structure)
Create & Sequence Activity List (Precedence Diagram Method)
Create Network Diagram (Using Activity on Node Approach)
Determine Critical Path (including Float/Slack)
Develop Schedule (i.e. Gantt Chart)
Another POV
Summary Diagram of the planning process group