Sunday 6 February 2022

Group processes of PMP

 


 

In the PMP body of knowledge, a complete project management process is divided into five process groups and ten knowledge areas.

Five process groups: start-> planning-> execution-> monitoring-> closure;

Ten knowledge areas: project integration management, scope management, schedule management, cost management, quality management, resource management, communication management, risk management, procurement management and related party management.

These five process groups and ten knowledge areas cross-form 49 processes, but not all projects will use these 49 processes, and different projects will use some processes and knowledge areas according to the actual situation. The following takes the project I am involved in as an example, and sorts out the project management process in combination with the actual situation.

The goal of the


project initiation process is to obtain project approval and reach consensus with team members on the project vision. This phase typically involves completing two key processes: developing the project charter and identifying interested parties.




1. Formulate the project charter




The project charter is the basis for obtaining the official approval of the project, how can our project be approved by the project? Project establishment review.

The process of project establishment is recommended to think from the following dimensions:

a, What: What: What does the project do? What is the primary deliverable?

Why: Why this project? What kind of benefits can it bring? Contract amount or strategic layout? Enterprises are not non-profit organizations and will not do projects with no value.

C. How: How? What is the top-level design?

How long: How long? The overall milestone plan of the project.

e. Risk: Is there technical risk, market risk or other risk?

After the project is approved, a large amount of manpower can be officially invested to implement the project.


2. Identifying Stakeholders




Purpose of Identifying Stakeholders: Understand in advance the impact of the project on all parties involved, as well as the needs and expectations of the parties to the project. The parties involved in our projects generally include: external customers, internal commerce, products, projects, research and development, testing, big data groups, etc.

After the project is approved and the identification of the relevant parties is completed, the relevant parties need to be convened to participate in the project kick-off meeting, which does not need to discuss too much details of the project realization, and mainly reaches consensus on the project objectives and organizational vision to boost morale. After the meeting, the project entered the planning phase.

The main objectives of the planning stage:


to clarify the scope of the project and to formulate the implementation path and plan to achieve the goals. In layman's terms, it is planned under what kind of project scope, how much cost, time and resources are used, what kind of project quality standards to be met, what risks are in this process, how to deal with them, etc.

In our project, the general focus of the planning phase involves the following 6 processes:

1. Define the scope


The process is mainly through communication with customers, to clarify what functions, performance and other requirements of the project, as well as the acceptance criteria of the project, to form a product specification document. FFor example, in AI projects, there are mainly static scene detection and dynamic behavior recognition functions, and there is an acceptance index for the volume of the product, CPU and memory occupancy, and the size of the AI model.

2. Create a WBS , that is, a work breakdown structure, to decompose the phase deliverables of the project into smaller work packages, such as the static scene detection function in the project, which can be subdivided into the underlying engine development and the java layer function development.



3. Arrange the order of activities Determine the dependencies between the work packages decomposed by WBS, and prioritize the implementation of the work package according to the dependencies, such as engine development, Java development, and model training can be carried out synchronously, and then the terminal function joint tuning; and the joint debugging of the backend and the terminal depends on the functional implementation of the terminal, and the terminal development cycle is long, so the development priority of the backend can be in the back row, and when the terminal development progress is almost completed, then start the backend development.


4. Estimating activity resources is generally an assessment of the workload given by team members, such as 5 days of engine development, 3 days of Java development, etc.


5. Make a schedule Plan


According to the order of activities, the evaluation of the duration, the development resources invested, the later test time, etc., the schedule plan is formulated, which is generally presented in the form of milestones. <



6. Identify risks


There is a need to have a sense of risk identification at all stages of the project life cycle, how to identify risks? That is, in which processes, what uncertain events exist, and what kind of impact. For example, in the process of AI model training, relying on the customer's training data, we are not sure about the volume and quality of customer training data, which will directly affect the recognition rate of the AI model, which is a big risk, and it is necessary to prepare countermeasures in advance, such as avoiding risks by internally producing training data.

The various plans formulated in the project planning stage are the "compass" of project implementation, and only by ensuring that the direction is clear can we correctly implement and achieve the project objectives.


The goal of the implementation stage is: according to the various project management plans formulated in the planning stage, assign work tasks and execute, in the actual project, the focus involves the following two processes:

1. Guide and manage the project work


The process is mainly based on the requirements, scope, project management plan, etc., confirm the rationality of the plan with the team members, and carry out the project work together.

2. Management communication


The main purpose of management communication is to maintain the consistency of project information among all relevant parties and avoid information asymmetry. For important projects, it is recommended to synchronize the progress of the project with the relevant parties in half a month or monthly unit; when there is a project change, it is also necessary to synchronize the change information of the project to the relevant parties in the form of email in a timely manner.

The purpose of the monitoring phase


is to track, review and adjust the progress of the project, identify necessary planning changes, and ensure that the project is completed on time and with quality. This process is also what we often call "project follow-up", which mainly includes monitoring progress, quality and handling the change process that occurs in the control process, that is, the following three processes:

1. Control progress


According to the schedule plan, supervise the progress of each matter of the project. This process may be at risk of schedule delays due to issues such as technical implementation. There are two general solutions: to add resources to solve the problem, or to change the technical solution.


2. Control quality


This process is generally a process of product testing, according to product specifications, requirements documents, etc., to test whether the product quality meets the standard.


3. Implementation of overall change control


In the process of project execution, changes may occur due to various problems such as scope, schedule, quality, cost, etc. The implementation of overall change control and the establishment of a set of correct processes to control the change of the project can effectively reduce the project risk. A complete change control process is divided into four steps: change request submission - > change request review - > change request execution - > summary.

In the actual project management process, the general impact of small changes, in order to improve work efficiency, will be omitted this process; but some of the more influential changes, such as involving a long development cycle, a large scope of influence, involving many related parties of the change, the need to strictly implement the change control process, only rely on the product or project manager to make a decision, the risk is too large, and finally will be transformed from risk into a problem.




fifth, the closing stage



This stage is mainly to accept the product, including internal acceptance and external customer acceptance, and to archive the relevant documents in the project process, summarize the lessons learned, and write the project closing report. The project is handed over to the operation team, and they will take the lead in following up the problem feedback of the project in the later stage, and the product participates in solving the problem.

In my actual work, the finishing process is often completed after the product acceptance, and the process of document filing and summarizing lessons learned is ignored, in fact, these two processes are also indispensable.


1. File archiving


In the last project I participated in, our product side maintained the requirements document, project management plan document, etc., the development side maintained the detailed program design document; the test side maintained the test document; and finally found that when other relevant parties want to find me to understand the project, I need to find documents everywhere, the efficiency is very low, and there may be some problems such as missing R&D documents. Therefore, in the closing stage of the project, it is recommended that all documents must be archived and sorted, including the R & D and design documents of each functional module, as well as product test reports, etc., to ensure the integrity of the project.


2. Summarize lessons Learned



In the process of project implementation, there will be many problems, such as asymmetric information in the communication process, unevaluated requirements changes, insufficient risk identification, etc. These known and solved problems must be avoided next time. Therefore, summarizing the lessons learned is a must be done, in this process, the areas that need to be improved will be summarized, and then regularly monitor and feedback their own review effect, whether it has really improved. It can not only provide their own work efficiency, but also as an organizational process asset for the reference of other students, which is beneficial to others and self-interested.


The above is a summary of the project management process combined with the PMP knowledge system. Learning PMP only acquires the theoretical knowledge of project management, which needs to be deliberately practiced and applied in practical work in order to truly internalize into project management capabilities. I hope the above sharing can help you~

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