PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Project Management



TABLE OF CONTENTS

Importance of identifying organizational and project requirements3

Requirements Specifications4

The business rationale of project portfolio management4

Elements of Effective Project Management Planning6

Goals of a project management plan7

What goes into a project management plan?7

Scope of the Project9

Work Breakdown Structure9

Scheduling and Costing10

GANTT Chart11

Stakeholder Analysis11

Closing Project in an effective manner12

References13

Appendix14

Project Management

Importance of identifying organizational and project requirements

Requirements definition is one of the most crucial steps in the process of creating a project. Without well-defined requirements, managers cannot plan a project, developers and integrators do not know what to build, customers do not know what to expect, and there is no way to validate that the system as built satisfies the needs of the organization. System requirements evolve over time. At each stage of the project, additional information is derived and documented. At the onset of the concept phase, for instance, basic business needs are expressed and documented. Over time, these needs are refined and developed into functional user requirements and are later developed into detailed technical specifications (Muther, 2011, pp. 111).

During project planning, technical requirements must be understood in enough detail to develop project budgets and define resources needed to implement the solution. Requirements are reviewed, the project team strives to understand the requirements, and the requirements are refined further, if necessary. A project team should never commit to the project activities list, schedule, or budget to build something unless it is well defined. If requirements will be defined in later stages of a development effort, the final, detailed project plan can only cover that portion of the project where the requirements are defined. Initial planning can occur for later phases, but a plan cannot be finalized until the requirements for the system are clear (Pinto, 2010, pp. 45). At project startup, requirements are reviewed to ensure that they are clear and that the development team has a full understanding of the requirements. Areas where additional definition is required are noted and logged as action items.

Requirements Specifications

The requirements specifications involve many layers of specification, but starts with a Business Needs Identification Statement. This is a very high level document that describes the top level needs that the system must meet. The statements are high level and may be met by a combination of automated and manual processes. For example, a Business Needs Requirement as related to the case study is to “achieve competitive advantage for S2 smart phones launched by Midland Phones”. Although this is the target requirement for the company and to achieve this requirement the company has to meet other project requirements as well. As mentioned above, the requirements are divided into many layers, until and unless one layer of requirement is not complete, the work on the other layer of requirement cannot be started, and even if started, it won't achieve the desired result as expected (Wit, 1988, pp. 164).

A functional specification describes the hardware and software requirements needed to perform defined functions. It is based upon the Business Needs Statement and further defines those ...