Project Management

1. Explain the role that projects play in the strategic management process - why should every project manager understand their organization's vision, mission and strategy.

Whatever direction a firm wants to go in it will accomplish the goals through projects. Projects help define the mission, vision, and goals of an organization. In a rapidly changing business environment, projects are the means by which companies develop new products and services. Since about the 1990's a dramatic change has taken place with companies being run a little differently than in the past. As companies restructure to strengthen their competitiveness, projects have become the focus. Whether they are developing new products or delivering better service, projects are the new focus of organizations.

With this new focus the institutionalizing of this practice known as enterprise project management (EPM) has become the organizational choice of accomplishing tasks.

Every project manager needs to understand their organizations vision or goals because that is how they as an individual employee will be successful in their career with this organization. By being successful at this they will set realistic expectations about the cost, schedule, and quality equilibrium with all the projects stakeholders. They will be expected to manage expectations throughout the project. If the equilibrium changes, make sure everybody knows and accepts the new equilibrium. Also, they need to deliver the promised product, on time and within budget.

I agree with what I have learned in this area. Large companies do have a strategic mission and this helps me understand that concept because I work for one and I see it every day. My inturpretation of this is that sometimes large corporations are so focused on their mission that they lose sight of many important aspects of their business. The focus needs to be a part of many aspects of the organization.

2. Describe an approach to identifying and managing risk in a multi-project environment.

Keeping track of all current and potential projects causes confusion for many firms, particularly when they are spreading the same people across many projects. One definition of program refers to all the projects that support a related goal Ð'- such as capturing and performing a contract to do many things at once. The other commonly used definition of program is simply the oversight of multiple projects within an organization. Often projects are related because they share broad organizational goals and draw on the same resources. This is a new trend and not proven over decades. But, it is working in many organizations and gives structure to a situation that needs some way to manage the various pieces of work.

One method to manage many projects is called Enterprise Project Management (EPM) which is the conscious integration of processes, technology, organization structure, and people in order to align strategy with the execution of projects. There are different components of EPM which include Program Management, Project Portfolio Management, and Project Management. This method integrates people, technology, organization, and process.

EPM can be a big change for some organizations because it is a newer type of management. It does not create a small effect generally but a large one often. It requires commitment from top to bottom in an organization to make it successful.

3. Explain the benefit of controlling project processes and project resources through a centralized Project Management Office (PMO).

The PMO strives to standardize and introduce economies of repetition in the execution of projects. The PMO is the source of documentation, guidance and metrics on the practice of project management and execution. A good PMO will base project management principles on accepted, industry standard methodologies such as PMBOK or PRINCE2. Increasingly influential industry certification programs such as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) as well as government regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley have propelled organizations to standardize processes. Organizations around the globe are defining, borrowing and collecting best practices in process and project management and are increasingly assigning the PMO to exert overall influence and evolution of thought to continual organizational improvement.

So the benefit of PMO's are that tasks are followed up on projects until completion, and reporting to the top management is done in a strategic purposeful way.

4. Describe the process and the importance of developing a WBS for a project.

A Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a fundamental project management technique for defining and organizing the total scope of a project, using a hierarchical tree structure. The first two levels of the WBS (the root node and Level 2) define a set of planned outcomes that collectively and exclusively represent 100% of the project scope. At each subsequent level, the children of a parent node collectively and exclusively represent 100% of the scope of their parent node. A well-designed WBS describes planned outcomes instead of planned actions. Outcomes are the desired ends of the project, and can be predicted accurately; actions comprise the project plan and may be difficult to predict accurately. A well-designed WBS makes it easy to assign any project activity to one and only one terminal element of the WBS.

A WBS will tend to be most useful for project management when its breadth and depth are thoughtfully balanced. A common pitfall is to inadequately group related elements, resulting in one or more nodes of the WBS becoming "too wide" to support effective management. This can make it difficult for management to find risk-relevant roll-up points within the WBS, requiring manual subtotaling of nodes or eventual restructuring of the WBS in order to make useful cost data more readily accessible. While no concrete standard exists for optimal depth or breadth, a common rule-of-thumb is to avoid having more than 7 immediate sub-elements below any given node of the WBS. This rule-of-thumb appears to be derived from psychological studies indicating that an average human brain is only capable of processing about 7 to 9 considerations simultaneously. The relevance of that psychological consideration to any particular WBS elaboration is left to the discretion of the WBS designer. At a minimum, the existence of more than 7 sister-nodes at any point in the WBS should prompt the designer to carefully consider whether those sub-elements might not best be expressed (and tracked) in more