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Strategic Planning: Involves determining long-term objectives by analyzing the strengths and weakness or an organization, study opportunities and threats in the business environment, perdition. This planning method provides important information to help identify and the select penitential projects. It will look at mission, vision and goals for the next 3-5 years.

S.W.O.T analysis Strength Weakness Opportunities Threats Helps provides potentials of projects.

Project planning pyramid

Strategic planning: senior executives develop the strategic plan

Business area analysis: Director and department managers analyze needs in their areas

Project planning: Various managers and stakeholders propose projects

Resource Allocation: Authorized managers allocate resources to selected projects.

Agile: they use an iterative workflow and incremental delivery of software in short iterations

Scrum: the leading agile development method for completing projects with a complex, innovative scope of work

Business case: is a document that provides financial justification for investing in a project.

Project Stakeholders: are people involved in or affected by project activities.

Internal project: stakeholders generally include the sponsor team and staff.

External project: includes customers, competitors, suppliers and other external groups.

Stakeholder register: is a document that includes details related to the identified project stakeholders.

Stakeholder analysis: is a technique for analyzing information to determine which stakeholders’ interests to focus on and how to increase stakeholder support throughout the project.

Project charter: a Document that formally recognizes the existence of a project and provides a summary of the projects objectives and management.

Project integration management: involves coordinating all the project management knowledge areas throughout a project life span

Project management plan: a document used to integrate and coordinate all project planning documents and to help guide a project execution, monitoring, control and closure

Project scope management: defining and controlling what work is or is not included in a project Purpose: determine how the project scope will be defined, validated and controlled

Scope baseline: composed of an approved scope statement, a WBS and WBS dictionary

Scope statement: describes product characteristics and requirements, user acceptance criteria and deliverables

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): a deliverable-orientated grouping of the work involved in a project that defines the total scope of the project

Work Package: a deliverable at the lowest level of the WBS, where it can be appropriately assigned to and managed by a single accountable person.

WBS Dictionary: a document that describes the deliverables on the WBS in more details

Closing processes: Include formalizing acceptance of the project or phase and bringing it to an orderly end.

Project managers: they work with the project sponsors, the project team and other people involved in a project to define, communicate and meet project goals

Project constraints: scope is what work will be done as part of the project. Time is how long should it take to complete the project. Cost is what should it cost to complete the project

Project management: the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements

Stakeholders: the people involved in or affected by project activities

Net present Value (NPV) analysis: is a method of calculating the expected net monetary gain or loss form a project by discounting all expected future cash inflows and outflows to the present point in time. Projects with higher NPV’s are preferred projects.

1)Cost and benefits for the life of the projects.2) Discount rate is the rate used in discounting future cash flows.3) The Annual discount factor is a multiplier for each year based on discount rate and year. (calculated as 1/ (1+discount rate) year)

Return of investment (ROI): it is the result of subtracting the project cost from the benefits and then dividing by the costs.  Ex: investment 100 next year your investment is worth 110, the ROI is ($110 – 100)/100 or 0.10(10 percent).

Payback Period: amount of time it will take to recoup the total dollars invested in a project (in form of net cash inflows) shorter payback period is better.

Balanced scorecard: is a methodology that converts an organization value driver

Problems: undesirable situations that prevent an organization from achieving its goals.

Opportunities – are changes to improve the organization.

Directives: New requirements imposed by management, government, or some external influence.

Project priority: there are 3 levels of priority high, medium and low Priority

Process: is a series of action directed towards a particular result.

Initiation processes: include action to begin projects and project phases

Planning processes: Include devising and maintaining a workable scheme to ensure that the project meets its scope, time, and its cost goals.

Executing processes: Include coordination people and other resources to carry out the project plans and produce the deliverables of the project or phase.

 Monitoring and controlling processes: measure progress towards achieving project goals, monitor deviation from plans, and take corrective action to match progress with plans and customer expectations.

Adaptive Life Cycle: is used when requirements are not well defined up front. This life cycle is can be iterative, incremental, or agile.

Hybrid Life Cycle: also called Combination of approaches can be used when the nature of different deliverables calls for different approaches.

Schedules are clearly defining all the activities it needs to perform.

What happens when multiple resources are used at once. (it will slow down the process and will show all current running activities

Mandatory, nine, buffers, analogous, team contract, baseline,                               

After a project is approved, senior managers should meet to determine the SCOPE

                                                Estimating techniques

Analogous Estimates: use the actual cost of a similar project. Requires a good deal of expert judgement and generally costs less, but less accurate. (Also called top-down)

Bottom-up: Estimating individual activities and summing them to get a project total. Can increase accuracy of estimate, can be a time intensive, and expensive.

Parametric: More accurate technique for estimating cost and duration, uses the relationship between variables to calculate the cost or duration

Expert Judgement: Set of criteria and/or expertise that has been acquired in a specific knowledge area, or product area, a particular discipline, an industry, etc.

Estimate vs. Budget: An estimate is an approximation of what your project will cost. Budget is what you’re allowed to spend. The estimate provides a guideline, the budget provides hard

edges. You can’t go ‘over-estimate’, but you can go over-budget.

Project quality management ensures that the project will satisfy the stated or implied needs for which it was undertaken. Key outputs produced as part of project quality management include a

quality management plan, quality metrics, and updates to the project management plan and project documents.

Quality planning includes identifying which quality standards are relevant to the project and how best to satisfy those standards. It also involves designing quality into the products of the project as

well as the processes involved in managing the project.

Quality Metrics allow organizations to measure their performance in certain areas and to compare them over time or with other organizations. Examples of common metrics used by organizations

include failure rates of products produced, availability of goods and services, and customer satisfaction ratings.

Project resource management is concerned with making effective use of the people involved with a project as well as physical resources (materials, facilities, equipment, and infrastructure). The

main outputs produced as part of project resource management planning are: Project resource management plan and Team charter.

Project organizational chart is a graphical representation of how authority and responsibility is distributed within the project.

A responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) maps the work of the project as described in the work breakdown structure (WBS) to the people responsible for performing the work.

A resource histogram is a column chart that shows the number of resources required for or assigned to a project over time.

A staffing management plan describes when and how people will be added to and removed from a project.

Predictive life cycle: is also called plan-driven and its used when therequirements can be will defined at the beginning of a project.