Chapter 4

 Planning is often the most difficult and unappreciated process group in project management, the main
purpose of project planning is to guide project execution. Planning is done upfront when using a
predictive approach to project management
 Plan the project scope and determine what activities need to be done before developing a detailed
project schedule. Likewise, develop a detailed project schedule before developing a cost baseline
 Project integration management involves coordinating all the project management knowledge areas
throughout a project’s life span and is the project manager’s job
 A project management plan is a document used to integrate and coordinate all project planning
documents. Plans created in the other knowledge areas are subsidiary parts of the overall project
management plan
 A baseline is a starting point, a measurement, or an observation that is documented so that it can be
used for future comparison. After the project management plan is baselined, however, it can only be
changed through the formal integrated change control process
 Specific plans in each of those knowledge areas provide more detailed baseline information. For
example, the project management plan might provide a high-level budget baseline for the entire
project, whereas the cost baseline prepared as part of the project cost management knowledge area
provides detailed cost projections by WBS by month
 Elements of project management plan are introduction/overview of the project, project organization,
management and technical processes (including project lifecycle description and development
approach, as applicable), work to be performed (scope) schedule and budget information, references
to other project planning documents
 Project champion is often in a higher-level position than the project sponsor. Projects that cross
functional boundaries, often benefit from having a high-level project champion, such as a vice
president, from a key functional area
 Project scope management involves defining and controlling what work is or is not included in a
project. Projects often produce several products, which have their own product scope to describe their
features and functions
o Project scope includes the scope of all products, services, and results produced plus the work
involved in the process of creating them
o The purpose of the process of planning scope management is to determine how the project
scope will be defined, validated, and controlled (validation means formal acceptance of
 deliverables by the customer and other identified stakeholders and verification done as part of
controlling quality, means the deliverable complies with a regulation, requirement,
specification, or imposed condition)
o Scope baseline is composed of an approved project scope statement, WBS, and a WBS
dictionary
o Project scope statement describes product characteristics and requirements, user acceptance
criteria, and project boundaries, constraints, assumptions and deliverables
 A requirement is a condition or capability that is necessary to be present in a product, service, or result
to satisfy a business need. A requirements management plan describes how project requirements will
be analyzed, documented, and managed
 Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) is a table that lists requirements, various attributes of each
requirement, and the status of the requirements and main purpose of an RTM is to maintain the
linkage from the source of each requirement through its decomposition to implementation and
verification
 Interviews and assessments are used for collecting requirements and prototyping is used for software
development projects and intensity of this activity is proportional to project size, complexity and
importance
 WBS is a document that breaks all the work required for the project into discrete deliverables, and
groups them into a logical hierarchy and acts as a basis for planning and managing project
o Work defined at the lowest level of the WBS, where it can be appropriately assigned to and
managed by a single accountable person, is called a work package. Each work package is part of
a control account, a management control point for performance measurement where scope,
budget, and schedule are integrated and compared to the earned value
o WBS should represent the project deliverables, not the tools, techniques, or actions required to
create those deliverables, i.e. what work needs to be done and not how the work will be done
o WBS 100% rule means that summing up all the components of the WBS should cover 100% of
the scope, there should be no repetition or missing of the project scope elements
o WBS is generally represented in graphical format, but tabular format is also an option. These
deliverables are defined as nouns, not verbs in WBS
o Every box on the WBS is referred to as a deliverable in context of itself, but it is called a sub-
deliverable when talking about it in reference to the larger deliverable above it
 o If a project will create something, it should be shown in the WBS and nothing else should be
created. It is also true for interim deliverables that will not end up in the hands of the customer
o The depth at a deliverable is decomposed is based upon the complexity of the work and after
creating the WBS activities are defined that are required to create those work packages that are
to be detailed in schedule, not WBS
o Guidelines/template, top-down, bottom-up (for innovative or brand new products), analogy, or
mind mapping (brainstorming) are 5 different approaches that can be used to develop a WBS
 A WBS dictionary is a document that describes the deliverables on the WBS in more detail. Any
attribute, characteristic, or quality that better defines the deliverable should be in the WBS dictionary
 Some organizations have a standard project life cycle for their type of work, called an Application Area
Process (AAP)
 The main difference between predictive and agile/hybrid planning is that planning remains at a high-
level for the long-term, but more detailed plans are created for the short-term as change is expected
and requirements can change after every iteration. Therefore, a lengthy document like a project
management plan is not required
o The daily scrum meetings, sprint planning meeting, sprint review, and sprint retrospectives
allow for necessary discussions and interactions
o For predictive projects, the scope is defined at the beginning of the project. For agile projects,
the scope is not completely known until the end of the project because the customer can add
and remove features and not even number of iterations required is known in advance.
o Agile approach is used when scope is unclear and cannot be defined in detail upfront, and
change is expected and it gives weightage to producing value, not the work. Therefore, in agile
projects, the emphasis on scope planning is on prioritizing and defining work that provides the
most value (unlike requirements documents in predictive environment)
o Product backlog is updated with user stories before each iteration during sprint planning and
this process is called backlog refinement to progressively elaborate and reprioritize the work to
determine what can be accomplished during an iteration and teams work with the product
owner to refine the product backlog
o Instead of a work breakdown structure, some experts suggest developing a value breakdown
structure (VBS) with themes as large focus areas covering the entire organization, an initiative
at the top (like level 1 in a WBS), then epics (level 2), and then stories (level 3)
 Initiatives - collection of several epics based on a common goal
  Epics - large work bodies broken down into a number of smaller tasks (stories)
 Stories - i.e. user stories end user’s perspective based short requirements
o MoSCoW - a prioritization framework for time-boxed projects (must-haves, should-haves,
could-haves, and will not have)
o Story cards are used to document key requirements that include a title, value statement,
requirements, size and acceptance criteria. The front of a card includes a user story and the
back of the card includes the acceptance criteria
o INVEST rule is used to develop these cards (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Size
and Testable)