Ch 4 PM Project Integration Management

week 6 oct. 2 - do not need to stress abt this chapter

Project Managers must coordinate…

all of the other knowledge areas throughout a project’s life cycle

• new PM’s tend to only focus on on the small details, they don’t focus on the big picture. That’s how the project gets held up.

What are the main processes of Project Integration Management?

developing the project charter, developing the project management plan, directing and managing project work, managing project knowledge, monitoring and change control, closing the project or phrase

Strategic planning

•Strategic planning involves determining long-term objectives

•Analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of an organization

•Studying opportunities and threats in the business environment

•Predicting future trends

•Projecting the need for new products and services

•SWOT analysis

•Analyzing Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats

•Identifying potential projects

•Start of project initiation

•There’s no bad ideas in projects, bcs you never know what will work and what won’t

•Aligning IT with business strategy

•Organization must develop a strategy for using IT to define how it will support the organization’s objectives

Planning process for selection IT projects

Methods for Selecting Projects

• Potential projects must be narrowed down

  • Methods for selecting projects

    • Focusing on broad organizational needs

    • Categorizing information technology projects

    • Performing net present value or other financial analyses

    • Using a weighted scoring model

    • Implementing a balanced scorecard

Categorizing IT Projects

• Categorizations

  • Respond to a problem, opportunity, or directive

  • How long it will take to complete a project and what is the deadline for completion

  • Overall priority of the project

SWOT

Performing Financial Analyses

• Financial considerations are often an important consideration in selecting projects

  • Regardless of current economics

• Primary methods for determining the projected financial value of projects

  • Net present value (NPV) analysis

  • Return on investment (ROI)

  • Payback analysis

NPV Analysis

Method of calculating the expected net monetary gain or loss from a project by discounting all expected future cash inflows and outflows to the present point in time

• projects with a positive NPV should be considered if financial value is a key criterion

• projects with high NPVs are preffered

Payback Analysis

• Payback period is the amount of time it will take to recoup, in the form of net cash inflows, the total dollars invested in a project

  • Determines how much time will elapse before accrued benefits overtake accrued and continuing costs

  • Payback occurs when the net cumulative discounted benefits equals the costs

  • Many organizations have requirements for the length of the payback period of an investment

Using a Weighted Scoring Model

• Provides a systematic process for selecting projects based on many criteria

  • Identify criteria important to the project selection process

  • Assign weights (percentages) to each criterion so they add up to 100%

  • Assign scores to each criterion for each project

  • Multiply the scores by the weights and get the total weighted scores

• A decision making model that helps you work through the factors and decide which of those factors are most important to you.

Implementing a Balanced Scorecard

• Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton developed this approach to help select and manage projects that align with business strategy

  • A balanced scorecard is a strategic planning and management system that helps organizations align business activities to strategy, improve communications, and monitor performance against strategic goals

Developing a Project Charter

• After deciding what project to work on, it is important to let the rest of the organization know

  • A project charter is a document that formally recognizes the existence of a project and provides direction on the project’s objectives and management

• Key project stakeholders should sign a project charter to acknowledge agreement on the need and intent of the project

  • A project charter is a key output of the initiation process

• Inputs for developing a project charter

  • Business case

  • Benefits management plan

  • Agreements

  • Enterprise environmental factors

  • Organizational process assets

Developing a Project Management Plan

• Document used to coordinate all project planning documents and help guide a project’s execution and control

  • Plans created in the other knowledge areas are subsidiary parts of the overall project management plan

• Common elements of a project management plan

  • Introduction/overview of the project

  • Description of how the project is organized

  • Management and technical processes used on the project

  • Work to be performed (scope)

  • Schedule and budget information

  • References to other project planning documents

Directing and Managing Project Work

• Involves managing and performing the work described in the project management plan

  • The majority of time and money is usually spent on execution

• The application area of the project directly affects project execution

  • Products of the project are produced during the execution phase

• The project manager needs to focus on leading the project team and managing stakeholder relationships to execute the project management plan successfully

  • Project resource management, communications management, and stakeholder management are crucial to a project’s success

Providing Strong Leadership and a Supportive Culture

• Project managers must lead by example

  • Demonstrate the importance of creating and then following good project plans and following them in project execution

• Organizational culture can help project execution

  • Providing guidelines and templates

  • Tracking performance based on plans

• Project managers may still need to break the rules to meet project goals

  • Senior managers must support those actions

Project Execution Tools and Techniques

• Project managers can use specific tools and techniques to perform activities that are part of execution processes to complete task efficiently and effectively

  • Expert judgment

  • Meetings

  • Project management information systems

Managing Project Knowledge

• Basic types of knowledge

  • Explicit knowledge: easily explained using words, pictures, or numbers and is easy to communicate, store, and distribute

  • Tacit knowledge: difficult to express and highly personal

• Knowledge management should be done before, during, and after projects are completed

  • Often very difficult to accomplish

Monitoring and Controlling Project Work

• Changes are inevitable on most projects, so it’s important to develop and follow a process to monitor and control changes

  • Monitoring project work includes collecting, measuring, and disseminating performance information

  • The project management plan provides the baseline for identifying and controlling project changes

• A baseline is a starting point, a measurement, or an observation that is documented so that it can be used for future comparison.

Monitoring and Controlling Project Work

• Corrective actions - result in improvement in project performance 

• Preventive change - reduce probability of negative consequences associated with project risk

• Defect repair - bring defective deliverable into conformance with requirements

Performing Integrated Change Control

• Identify, evaluate, and manage changes throughout project lifestyle.

• Main objectives

  • Influencing the factors that create changes to ensure that changes are beneficial

  • Determining that a change has occurred

  • Managing actual changes as they occur

Change Control System

• Formal, documented process that describes when and how official project documents and work may be changed

  • Describes who is authorized to make changes, paperwork required for these changes, and any automated or manual tracking systems the project will use

• Change control board (CCB) is a formal group of people responsible for approving or rejecting changes on a project

  • Provide guidelines for preparing change requests, evaluate change requests, and manage the implementation of approved changes

• Some CCBs only meet occasionally, so it may take too long for changes to occur

  • Some organizations have policies in place for time-sensitive changes

Closing Projects or Phases

• To close a project or phase, you must finalize all activities and transfer the completed or cancelled work to the appropriate people

  • Main inputs are the project charter, project management plan, project documents, accepted deliverables, business documents, agreements, procurement documentation, and organizational process assets

• Main tools and techniques are expert judgment, data analysis, and meetings

Using Software to Assist in Project Integration Management

• Several types of software can be used to assist in project integration management

  • Documents can be created with word processing software

  • Presentations are created with presentation software

  • Tracking can be done with spreadsheets or databases

  • Communication software can facilitate communications

  • Project management software can pull everything together and show detailed and summarized information

Sample portfolio management software screens