Program management

Contents:

1. Foundation of project management.
2. Project Initiation: Starting a successful project.
3. Project Planning: Putting it all together.
4. Project execution: Running the project.
5. Agile Project Management

Foundation of project management

Introduction

Project Management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to to meet the project requirements and achieve the desired outcome on time and within budget..

A project is a temporary pursuit that has defined beginning and end. It includes a set of unique deliverables.

Roles of a project manager

1. Planning and organizing(gathering requirements, assembling a team, creating a plan).
2. Managing tasks(managing team members tasks and communication).
3. Budgeting.
4. Controlling costs and other tasks.

Important skills for a project manager include:

• Time management
• Leadership
• Problem solving
• Managing budget
• Coordination

A project manager does teaching and mentoring, building relationships, empowering the team, controlling change, communicating.

A project manager helps a business meet its goal on time and on budget.

Becoming and effective project manager

Project managers - Shepherd projects from start to finish and serve as guides for their team, using impeccable organizational and interpersonal skills in every step of the way.

Stakeholders - Are people who are interested in and affected by the project’s completion and success.

• Delegation - giving tasks to team members who can do it best.
• Effective communication and transparency between team members and stakeholders.
• Prioritization - determining which tasks are the most critical to the success of the project
• Focusing on the customer
• Building a great team.
• Fostering good relationships and communication.
• Managing the project.
• Breaking barriers.

Planning and organizing

• Make use of productivity tools and create processes.
• Create plans, timelines, schedules and other forms of documentation to track project completion.

Budgeting and controlling costs and other factors

• Monitor and manage the budget.
• Track issues and risks.
• Manage quality. Remove unforeseen barriers.

A project task is an activity that needs to be accomplished within a set of time by you, team or stakeholders.

Guide and provide support.

A manager:

• Hold team members accountable for their assigned tasks.
• Ensure that issues and risks are tracked and visible and establish escalation paths.
• Understand and help teammates adopt the right workflow and project management styles.
• Collaborate with other teams at the organization to deliver solution that meets the requirements based on project scope, schedule and budget. Choose a cross-functional team.
• Clarify goals. Get team members with the right skills.
• Measure progress.
• Recognize effort.

Skills for successful project management

1. Enabling decision making
2. Communicating and escalating.
3. Flexibility.
4. Strong organization skills.
5. Industry knowledge. ie tools, templates, project management styles.

Leadership and team dynamics - influencing with authority. Guide teammates to complete their assigned tasks without acting as their direct manager.

Key interpersonal skills - communication, negotiation, conflict mediation, understanding motivations.

Project development lifecycle

1. Initiate the project
2. Make a plan
3. Execute and complete tasks
4. Close the project.

Initiate the project

• Define project goals
• Determine resources, people and other requirement details.
• Get project approved.

Make a plan

• Create a budget
• Set the schedule.
• Establish your team.’
• Determine roles and responsibilities.

Execution and completing tasks

• Manage the progress.
• Communicate.
• Make adjustments.
• complete the tasks.

Close the project.

• Ensure all tasks have been completed.
• Confirm acceptance of the project outcome.
• Reflect on the lessons learned.
• communicate results with stakeholders.
• celebrate the completion of your project.
• Formally move on from the project.

A retrospective is a chance to note best practices and learn how to manage a project more effectively the next time.

Project management methodology

Is a set of guiding principles and processes for owning a project trough it’s lifecycle.

• Linear means the previous phase/ task has to be completed before the next can start. eg building a house.
• Iterative means that some phases and tasks will overlap or happen at the same time that other tasks are being worked on.

Waterfall model - Each task are completed sequentially. Used when there are tasks to complete before another can begin, when project changes are expensive to implement once it’s started, when phases of the project are clearly defined.

Agile - Ability to move quickly and easily, willing to change and adopt, done in pieces. Adopt iterative approach, the phases overlap and the tasks are completed in iterations, which in scrum are called sprints.

Lean and Sigma - Save money, Improve, quality, Move quickly through processes, Team Collaboration, Positive work environment. Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control(DMAIC)

Kanban -An agile approach and a tool that provides a visual feedback about status of the work in progress through the use of kanban boards/chats.

Organizational structure and culture

Organizational structure is the way a company or organization is arranged.

Types include:

• Matrix - Has direct higher ups and stakeholders from other departments/programs.
• Classic - functional/top-down structure.

Resource availability - knowing how to access the people, equipment and budget needed for a project.

Functions of a project management office

• Strategic planning and governance.
• Best practices.
• Common project culture.
• Resource management.
• Creation of project documentation, archives and

Organizational culture refers to the values employees share as well as the organizations values, mission and history.

Change Management is the process of delivering your completed project and getting people to adopt it.

• creating a sense of ownership and urgency.
• Figure out the right combination of skills and personalities
• Effective communication - transparency.

2. Project Initiation: Starting a successful project

Initiate a project

1. Identify the project scope, goals, and deliverables.
2. Identify the project stakeholders.
3. Scoping project tools and resources.

Initiation

Begin after a problem or opportunity has been identified.

Research, determine resources, determine key components , understand expectations.

Cost Benefit Analysis - the process of adding up the expected value of a project. The benefits and comparing them to the dollar costs.

Benefits of determination

• What value will this project create?
• How much money could this project save?
• How much money will it bring in from existing customers?
• How much time will be saved?
• How will the user experience be improved?

Cost determination

• How much time will the project take?
• What will be the one time cost?
• Are there any ongoing costs?
• What about long term costs?

Components of Initiation

1. Goals - what you have asked to do, what you’re trying to achieve.
2. Scope - is the process to define the work that need to be done in order to complete the project.
3. Project deliverables - products and services that will you create for your customers, clients or project sponsors.
4. Success criteria - is the standards by which you measure how successful a project was in reaching it’s goals.
5. Stakeholders - people who both have interest in, and are affected by the completion and success of a project(Understand their need early on).
6. Resources - budget, people and materials needed.
7. Create a project charter

A project charter is a document that clearly defines the project and it’s goals, and outlines what is needed to accomplish them.

• Ensure everyone is aligned before planning and then execution.
• Meet with the stakeholders and understand expectations
• ROI(Return of Investment)

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Intangible benefits

1. Customer satisfaction
2. Employee satisfaction
3. Employee productivity
4. Brand perception

(G - C) / C = ROI

where G - Gains, and C = Upfront Cost

Define project goals, scope and success criteria

• Define and create project goals and deliverables.
• Define project scope, what is considered in-scope, out-of-scope and scope recap.
• Explain how to define and measure a project success criteria.

Determining project goals and deliverables:

• Project goal is the desired outcome of the project(what you have been asked to de or what you are trying to achieve).
• Project deliverables are products/services that are created for the customer, client or project sponsor. What gets produced from the project at the end of the project report. A deliverable helps quantify and realize the impact of the project.
• Meet with stakeholders and refine goals.
• Assess stakeholders power and influence on the project.
• Assign roles and responsibilities to promote the service.
• Create a charter for the next stage of the project.

• Goals should be well defined and SMART:

  • Specific - what do I want to accomplish?, why is this a goal?, who is involved?, where is the goal to be delivered?, what is the degree?
  • Measurable - how much?, how many?, how will I know it’s accomplished?(Use metrics, benchmark point of reference)
  • Attainable - can it be reasonably reached?, how can it be accomplished?
  • Relevant - does it make sense?, is the goal worthwhile?, is it the right time?
  • Time-bound - deadline and clear time frame

Introduction to Objective and Key results(OKR’s)

Help in establishing and clarifying goals or objectives. They combine a goal and a metric to determine a measurable outcome.

Objective defines what needs to be achieved, describe the desired outcome. eg. Increase customer retention.

Key results - measurable outcomes that define when the objective have been met. eg. Achieve 90% customer satisfaction by the end of the year, stretch goals(ambitions).

Project scope

Boundary of a project.What is included and excluded.

• Who will be using the product
• Timeline, budget, resources.
• Talk to sponsors and stakeholders.
• Why is this project needed?
• Where did the project come from?
• What is it expected to achieve?
• What does the sponsors have in mind?
• Who approves the final result?

scope creep - changes, growth an uncontrolled factors that affect a projects scope at any point after the project begins.

Sources of scope creep can be internal or external.

solutions to scope creep include:

• Allow visibility
• Get clarity of requirements.
• Set ground rules and expectations.
• Create a plan on how to deal with out-of -scope requests.
• Have requirements and rules written.

Triple constrains model

Scope + Cost + Time = Quality

Launch - refers to delivering the final result of your project to the client/ user.

Landing - refers to measuring success of your product using the success criteria established at the outset of the project.

Success criteria

Include specific details of goals and deliverables

Tells you whether or not the project was successful.

Are standards by which the project could be judged once it’s been delivered to stakeholders.

• Identify the measurable aspects of the project
• Get clarity from stakeholders eg. on project requirements and expectations.
• Engagement - how often or meaningful customer interaction and participation over time
• Adoption

Working with stakeholders

Accessibility is the process of actively removing any barriers that might prevent persons with disabilities from being able to access technology,information, experiences and leveling the playing field so everyone has an equal chance of enjoying life and being successful.

A project manager responsibility is bringing people together to achieve a common goal.

Choosing a project team:

• List of required roles
• Team size
• Necessary skills, motivation and availability.

Defining project roles

• Project sponsor - the person who is accountable for the project and ensures the project delivers the agreed upon business benefit.
• Team members - the people doing the work and making things happen.
• Customers - the people who will get some value from a successfully landed project.
• Users - the people who will use the product produced by the project.
• Stakeholders -anyone involved in the project, has vested interest in the project success.
• Project manager - the person who plans, organizes and oversees the whole project.

Evaluating stakeholders

1. Make a list of all the stakeholders and how they impact the project.
2. Determine the level of interest and influence for each stakeholder.(How much are the needs of the stakeholders affected by the project operations and outcomes).
3. Assess stakeholders ability to participate and then find ways to involve them. (Influence measures how much power a stakeholder has and how much this stakeholder action affects the project outcome)

(Interest + Influence)

• (High Power + High Interest) - Key players.
• (High Power + Low Interest) - Meet their needs.
• (Low Power + High Interest) - Show consideration.
• (Low Power +Low Interest) - Monitor(minimum effort).

Stakeholder buy-in - involving them in decision making.

RACI chart

A RACI chart helps to define roles and responsibilities for individuals or teams to ensure work gets done efficiently.

• Responsible - those doing the work
• Accountable - those making sure the work gets done.
• Consulted - those giving feedback, like subject mater experts/ decision makers.
• Informed - those just needing to know the final decisions, or that the task is complete.

Project Initiation missteps

1. Unclear expectations.
2. Unrealistic expectations.
3. Miscommunication.
4. Lack of resources.
5. Scope creep.

Utilizing resources and tools for project success

• Understand types of resources available to a project manager.
• Document information in a formal project charter.
• Compare and use various project management tools.
• Budget - An estimate of the amount of money a project will cost to complete.
• Resources also include people who will help execute the tasks of a project.
• Materials are items you need to help get the project done.
• Tools - aids that make it easier for a project manager to manage resources and organize work.

A project manager guides decisions making.

Documentation

• Help set the stage for the project
• Clear and consistent documentation can ensure transparency and clear communication.
• What problem are you trying to solve?
• What are the project goals.
• What are the scope and deliverables, and who are the project stakeholders.
• What resources do they need to complete their work.

Types of project documentation:

1. Project Proposal - A form of documentation that persuades a stakeholder to begin a project. It’s created by seniors mostly.

2. Project Charter - A formal document that that clearly defines the project and outlines the necessary details needed to reach it’s goals.

   • helps you get organized
   • makes clear that the benefits of the project outweighs the cost of the project.
   • help ensure that you and your stakeholders agree on the details of the project.
   • Creating a project charter is a best practice for ensuring that everyone is agrees on how to move forward before entering the planning phase.

   Content:

   1. Project title
   2. Project summary
   3. Project goals
   4. Project deliverables
   5. Business case/ Background.
   6. Benefits, costs and budget needed.
   7. Scope and exclusion(in and out of scope)
   8. Project team(project sponsor, lead, team, other stakeholders)
   9. Measuring success.

Tools

Help in tracking detailed information about all kinds of project tasks and make it easy to communicate with different people

• Track tasks and deadlines
• provide visibility
• Manage budget
• Create helpful diagrams
• Manage contracts
• Keep stakeholders informed.

Types of tools include:

1. Scheduling and work management eg. asana and jira.
2. Productivity tools - online shared documents, meeting agendas, status updates, spreadsheets, presentations, overviews, code editors
3. Collaboration tools - email, chat, github.

example of tools - Asana, atlassian tools, trello, google workspace, clickup, monday.com

Project Planning: Putting it all together

Benefits of project planning

Project initiation

1. Project manager gets assigned.
2. Project goals, scope and deliverables have to be approved.
3. Team members get assigned.
4. Sign off your project charter.

Project Planning

1. Understand the work needed to achieve your goals.
2. Coordinate efforts and timelines with other teams, contractors and vendors.
3. Identify and prepare for risks.
4. Get “buy-in” from key members of the project team.

Teamwork

• Schedule - the project timeline which includes the start date, end date and dates for events in between.
• Budget - accounts for the total cost for possible problems related to the project and planning ahead to mitigate those risks.

• Project kick-off meeting - the first meeting in which a project team comes together to ground everyone in a shared vision, gain a shared understanding of the project’s goals and scope, and to understand each person’s individual roles within a team. Can include the project team, project stakeholders and project sponsors Importance

  • Establish a shared vision
  • Align on scope
  • Build team rapport
  • Ask questions and offer insights

  Agenda

  1. Introduction

     • Team member names.
     • Project roles
     • Fun facts

  2. Background

     • How the project came to be
     • Why the project matters

  3. Goals and scope

     • In-scope
     • Out-of-scope
     • Target launch date.
     • Milestone

  4. Roles

     • What work everyone is responsible for throughout the duration of the project.

  5. Collaboration

     • Shared project tools and documents
     • Communication expectations. eg. emails, chatroom

  6. What comes next

     • Set expectations on what is next and members upcoming responsibility.

  7. Questions

     • Gain clarity on meeting topics
     • Ensure the project benefits from diversity of thorough experience and ideas.

  Best practices:

  • Ask teammates to take notes on key points and action items.
  • After the meeting, send follow-up email that summarizes the key points and outcomes from the meeting and any action items to the attendees.

Understanding tasks and milestones

• A milestone is an important point within the project schedule that indicates progress and usually signifies the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project.
• A project task is an activity tha needs to done within a set period of time.
• Tasks add up to milestones

Importance of milestones:

1. Setting milestones gives you a clear understanding of the amount of work that needs to be done
2. Help you keep your project on track.
3. help uncover areas where you might need to adjust scope, timeline, or project resources to meet your goals.
4. Reaching milestones can seriously motivate your team and illustrate real progress to your stakeholders.
5. Serve as a great check-in point to highlight your progress to stakeholders.
6. Milestones must be completed on time and in sequential order.
7. If you fail to complete a deliverable tied to a specific milestone, it could be a set back to your project schedule.

How to set milestones:

1. Evaluate your project as a whole.
2. Make a list of what is supposed to be done to achieve the goal and group them int milestone.
3. Assign deadlines to each milestone.

Work Breakdown Structure is a tool that sorts the milestone tasks of a project in a hierarchy, in the order they need to be completed. ie. creating a tree diagram

After completing a WBS you should have:

• A set of discrete project tasks that ladder up to each of your milestone.
• Team members assigned to each task according to people responsibility, consider each member workload, ensure teammates are clear of their assigned goal timeline. It creates a sense of personal responsibility for each task.

Building a project plan

components:

1. Tasks
2. Milestones
3. People
4. Documentation - RACI, budget, project charter, WBS
5. Time
6. Time estimation - is a prediction of the total amount of time required to complete a task(active + inactive).
7. Effort estimation - is a prediction of the amount and difficulty of active work required to complete a task.
8. Buffer - is the extra time added to the end of a task or project to account for unexpected showdowns(delays in work progress).
9. Task buffer - extra time tacked on to end of a specific task
10. Project buffer - extra time tacked on to the end of a project.
11. Capacity - the amount of work that people/ resources assigned the project can reasonably complete in a set period of time.
12. Capacity planning - refers to the act of allocating people and resources to the project tasks, and determining whether or not they have the necessary resources required to complete the work on time.

13. Critical path - the list of project milestone you must reach in order to meet the project goal on schedule, as well as the mandatory tasks that contribute to the completion of each milestone. The critical path includes the bare minimum number of tasks and milestones you need to reach your project goal.

    • list all tasks and milestones in order and determine dependency, determine which task can happen sequentially or in parallel.
    • determine which task has a fixed start date
    • determine which task has the earliest start date
    • identify which task has float. Float refers to the amount of time you can wait to begin a task before it impacts the project schedule and threatens the project outcome.
    • tasks on the critical path should have zero float.
14. Network diagram - graphical representation of project tasks, responsibilities and workflow.
15. Planning fallacy - faulty predictions about how much time you need to complete a task.
16. Forward pass - when you move forward through your network diagram to identify early finish dates.
17. Backward pass - when you count back from an end result to identify late start and finish dates.

18. Soft skills - personal characteristics that help people work efficiently with others.

    • Asking the right questions(open-ended questions)
    • Negotiating efficiently
    • Practising empathy
19. An anchor of a good project plan is a clear schedule containing all the tasks of a project, their owners and when they need to be completed.
20. Gantt chart - is a horizontal bar chart that maps out a project schedule. Gantt charts are highly visual representation of a project tasks, with clear breakdown of who’s responsible for the work and when those work are due.
21. Kanban boards uses cards.

Project plan best practices:

1. Carefully review deliverables, milestones and tasks.
2. Give yourself time to plan
3. Recognize and plan for the inevitable, things will go wrong.
4. Stay curious.
5. Champion your plan.
6. Understand the expectations of, priorities, risk assessment and communication styles of your stakeholders and vendors.
7. Task id numbers/ task name
8. Task duration
9. Start and finish dates
10. Who is responsible for what

tools include - asana, jira, trello, smartsheet

• Kanban are a visual tool used to manage tasks and workflows.
• Kanban boards can be created on whiteboards, magnetic boards, poster boards, computer programs etc.

• Purpose of kanban boards:

  • Give quick visual understanding of work details and provide critical task information.
  • Facilitate handoff between stakeholders
  • Help capturing metrics and improving workflow. eg Todo, in progress, testing, done

Managing budgeting and procurement

Importance of setting up a budget

A project budget is the estimated monetary resources needed to achieve the project’s goals and objectives.

Forecast - a cost estimate or prediction over a period of time.

Budget creation takes place in the initiation phase. Budgeting takes place in conjunction with scheduling process.

1. Increase workforce productivity.
2. Increase revenue.
3. Attempts to save costs.

A project manager must show the requested amount of money was used in order to secure enough budget for future projects.

When creating a budget, the project manager must account for:

1. Understanding stakeholders needs.
2. Budgeting for surprise needs and expenses.
3. Maintain adaptability.
4. Reviewing and re-forecasting throughout the project.

Resource cost - cost of a resource.

Reserve analysis -a method to check for remaining project resources.

Contingency budget - money that is included to cover potentially unforeseen events that aren’t accounted for in a cost estimate.

Cost quality - cost that are incurred to prevent issues with products, processes or tasks. ie. prevention costs, appraisal costs, internal failure costs, and external failure costs

Direct costs include:

1. Wages and salaries
2. material costs
3. Equipment rental costs
4. Software licenses
5. Project related travel and transportation costs
6. Staff training

Indirect costs include:

1. Administrative costs
2. Utilities costs
3. Insurance costs
4. General office equipment
5. Security

A Baseline budget is an estimate of project costs that you start with at the beginning of your project.

When creating a project budget:

1. Use historical data reference.
2. Leverage experts
3. Bottom up - think about all parts, break, add up
4. Confirm accuracy

5. Baseline

   • Break the project into tasks(cost estimate, material)
   • Add estimates together
   • Add contingency and tax.
   • Seek approval from key stakeholders.
6. Fixed-one time costs
7. Buffers and reserves
8. Planned cost vs actual cost
9. Estimated vs final cost

Monitoring the budget is crucial for a project manager to enforce accountability in terms of spending

Milestones are a great opportunity to re-review the budget.

Fixed contracts are paid for when certain milestones are reached.

Time and materials contract are paid monthly based on hours worked and other fees associated with the work.

Cost control - a practice where a budget manager identifies factors that might impact their budget and then creates effective actions to minimize variances.

Controlling costs:

1. Establish a sign off plan and inform the appropriate stakeholders of any changes that occur.
2. Manage changes as they’re made.
3. Accept that budget misses will happen.
4. Adequately account for, adapt and manage your budget with that risk in mind(under budget/ over budget = bad)

Overcoming budget challenges:

1. Budget pre-allocation
2. Inaccurately calculating total cost of ownership(TCO).

3. Scope creep caused by:

   • A vague statement of work(SoW)
   • Conversations and disagreements about the project that aren’t officially documented.
   • Unattainable time-frames and deadlines
   • Last minute asks from stakeholders.
4. Cash flow - inflow and outflow of cash on your project
5. Capital expense(CAPEX) - organizations major, long-term upfront expenses. eg buildings, equipment, vehicles
6. Operating expenses(OPEX) - organizations short-term expenses that are required for day to day tasks. eg. wages, rent , utilities. They are often recurring.
7. Contingency reserves - funds added to the estimates project cost to cover unidentified risks(buffers). Management risks - cover cost of unidentified risks.

Procurement

Procurement is the process of obtaining all the materials, services, and supplies required to complete the project.

Vendors are individuals or businesses who provide essential goods and services.

Managing Vendors:

1. Sourcing vendors
2. Getting quotes for vendors work
3. Deciphering which vendors will fulfill your needs.
4. Negotiating vendor contract
5. Setting deadlines for vendors
6. Evaluating performance.
7. Ensuring vendors are paid.

Procurement process:

1. Initiating
2. Selecting
3. Contract writing
4. Control
5. Completing

Agile procurement management:

1. Collaborative with both the project team and the supplier.
2. Emphasis on the relationship between these parties.
3. Project team plays a larger role in identifying what needs to be procured.
4. Living contract.

Procurement documentation:

1. Non-disclosure Agreement(NDA) - keeps confidential information
2. Request for Proposal(RFP) - project information
3. Statement of Work(SoW) - clearly lays out the product and services a vendor/contractor will provide + contractor/ vendor needs

*Subject Matter Experts(SME’s)

Have a legal team.

Maintain ethics as stated in Project Management Institute(Code of Conduct).

Don’t involve yourself in Unethical practices such as:

1. Bribery and corruption
2. Sole-supplier sourcing
3. Interaction with state owned agency.

Making risks effectively

Risk - a potential event which can occur and can impact your project.

Issue - a known or real problem that can affect the ability to complete a task.

Risks become a issue.

Risk management - is the process of identifying and evaluating potential risks and issues that could impact the project. Helps in understanding:

1. What could go wrong
2. Who you’ll need to consult
3. How the risk could be mitigated.

Not planning ahead can be fatal.

Risk management life cycle:

1. Identify the risk.
2. Analyze the risk.
3. Evaluate the risk.
4. Treat the risk
5. Monitor the risk.

An Opportunity is a potential positive outcome that may bring additional value to a project. Make a plan to seize opportunities.

Tools to identify risks include: Brainstorming, risk assessment.

• Cause-and-effect diagram - a diagram that shows the possible causes of an event or risk.
• Risk register - a table or chart that contains a list of risks.
• Risk assessment - the stage of risk management where qualities of a risk are estimated or measured.
• Impact - the damage a risk could cause, if it occurs, determined on a scale of high, medium and low.
• Probability - likelihood that a risk will occur(high, medium and low)
• Inherent risks the measure of a risks, calculated by it’s probability and impact.
• Risk appetite - the willingness of an organization to accept the possible outcome of a risk.
• External risks - risks resulting from factors outside the company that you could have little control over.
• Single point of failure - a risk that has the potential to be catastrophic and halt work across a project.
• Dependency - a relationship between two project task, where the start or completion of one depends on the start or completion of the other.
• Internal dependencies - dependencies within the project that you and your team have control over.
• External dependencies - dependencies you have no control over.
• Decision tree - a flowchart that helps visualize the wider impact of a decision on the rest of the project.

Types of risks:

1. Time - project tasks may take longer.
2. Budget risks - cost increase due to poor planning/ scope increase.
3. Scope risk - possibility that a project won’t produce the result outlined in the project.

Risk mitigation types:

1. Avoid
2. Minimize
3. Transfer
4. Accept

Types of dependencies:

1. Final to Start(FS) - task A must be completed before task b start.
2. Finish to Finish(FF) - task A must finish before task B finish.
3. Start to Start(SS) - task A can’t be started before task b begins.
4. Start toFinish(SF) - task A must begin before task B is completed.

Building a risk management plan:

A risk management plan is a living document that contains information regarding high level risks and the mitigation plans for those risks.

• Project name
• Objective
• Executive summary
• Possible risks(description, risk rating, mitigation)
• Appendix(impact chart)

Communicating risk to stakeholders:

• Low - send emails
• medium - send emails
• high - share

Organizing communication and documentation

Communication is the flow of information and includes what is shared , how it is shared, and with whom.

Communication should be clear, honest, relevant and frequent.

Tips for effective communication:

1. Recognize and understand individual differences.
2. Brainstorm and craft the appropriate message
3. Deliver your message.
4. Obtain feedback and incorporate that feedback going forward.

Communication plan - organizes and documents the process, types and expectations of communication for the project.

• What needs to be communicated?
• Who needs to communicate?
• When communication can happen?
• Why and how to communicate?
• Where the information being communicated is stored.

Planning communication upfront:

• Improve communication overall
• Keeps people engaged and motivated.
• Get’s stakeholders involved in effective conversations.
• Store documents in a centralized place.
• Make sure people in relevant roles are granted access to documents so that even in your absence the project can carry on.

Knowledge management - a way of ensuring that the project data can be accessed in the future by others who need it for informing decisions or planning similar projects.

• Share information on a need to know basis.
• Personally Identifiable Information(PII) - information that could be used on it’s own to directly identify, contact, or precisely locate an individual.

Documents:

1. Project plan
2. Budget
3. RACI chart
4. Risk Management Plan
5. Communication plan
6. Mitigation Plan
7. Project charter
8. Work plan schedule
9. Statement of work.

Project Execution: Running the Project

Tracking - a method of following the progress of project activities.

Deviation - anything that alters your original course of action. Deviation from the project plan can cause positive or negative impact. Transparency is essential for accurate decision making.

Importance of tracking:

1. Help in recognizing issues
2. Help in building confidence and timely delivery
3. Ensures transparency.

Track project schedules, status action, tasks, milestone, cost, key decisions, changes, dependencies, risks.

Tracking methods include: Gantt charts, Roadmap, burndown charts

Roadmap - measure large milestones, high level

Gantt chart - measure time against tasks, good for large teams.

Burndown chart - good for project that require granular, broken down look at each task, tight schedule(task/time).

Project status report - gives an overview of all the project’s common elements and summarizes them in snapshots. Contains project name, date, summary, status, milestone, tasks and issues

Why risk and changes occur:

1. New or changing dependencies.
2. Changing priorities.
3. Capacity and people.
4. Budget/ resource limitations.
5. Scope creep. Force majeure.

Type of dependencies include: External, Internal, Mandatory, Discretionary,

Dependency management - process of managing inter-related tasks and resources within the project to ensure the project is completed.

Risk exposure - a way to measure the potential future loss resulting from a specific activity/event.

ROAM technique(Resolved, Owned, Accepted, Mitigated)

Escalating issues - the process of enlisting the help of higher level project leadership/ management to remove an obstacle, clarify or reinforce priorities and validate next steps. Importance of escalation include:

1. Act as checks and balances
2. Generate speedy decisions.
3. reduce frustrations.
4. Encourage participation.

Critical issues to be escalated in a project are:

1. Cause a delay on a major project milestone.
2. Cause budget overruns.
3. Can result in the loss of a customer.
4. push back the estimated project completion date.

Timeout - taking a moment away from the project in order to take a breath, regroup and adjust the game plan.

Retrospective - a meeting focused on identifying the contributing causes of an incident/ pattern of incidents without blaming any individual.

Quality management and continuos improvement

Quality - when you fulfill the outlined requirements for the deliverable and meet or exceed the needs or expectations of your customers.

• Quality standards - provide requirements, specifications, or guidelines that can be used to ensure that products, processes, or services are fit for achieving desired outcome. eg. reliability standards, usability standards, product standards.
• Quality planning -the actions of the project manager or the team to establish a process for identifying and determining exactly which standards of quality are relevant to the project as a whole.
• Quality assurance - evaluating if your project is moving towards delivering a high quality service or product.
• Quality control - involves monitoring project results and delivery to determine if they are meeting desired result or not.
• Feedback survey - a survey in which users provide feedback on features of your product that they like or dislike.
• User-acceptance-test - a test that helps a business make sure a product/solution work for it’s users.
• Control - an experiment or observation designed to minimize the effects of a variable.
• Data-driven improvement framework - techniques used to make decisions based on actual data.

DMAIC(Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control)

PDCA(Plan, Do, Check, Act) - a four step process that focuses on identifying a problem, fixing it, assessing whether the fix was successful and fine-tuning the final fix.

Project - one single focused endeavour

Program - a collection of projects

Portfolio - a collection of projects and programs.

Importance of a retrospective:

1. Encourage team building
2. Facilitate improved collaboration
3. Promote positive changes.

Data-informed decision making

Data is a collection of facts or information.

Benefits of using data: make better decisions, solve problems, understand performance, improve processes, understand users.

Metric - a quantifiable measurement that is used to track and asses business objectives.

Productivity metric - allow you to track the effectiveness and efficiency of your project.

projection - how you predict an outcome based on the information you need.

Duration - the total time it takes to complete a project from start to finish.

Quality metrics - metrics that relate to achieving acceptable outcomes eg number of changes, cost variance, issues.

change log - list of all changes

cost variance -actual cost vs budgeted cost

signal - observable change

Data ethics - study and evaluation of moral challenges related to data collection and analysis.

Reasons to apply data ethics:

• Comply with regulations.’
• Show that they are trustworthy
• Ensure fair and reasonable data usage
• Minimize biases
• Develop a positive public perception

Increase data privacy awareness, using secure tools, anonymize data

Data biases - type of error that tend to skew results in a certain direction. ie. sampling, observer interpretation, confirmation bias.

Data analysis - the process of collecting and organizing information to help draw conclusion.

Quantitative data - statistical and numerical dat.

Qualitative data - subjective qualities that can’t be measured with numerical data.

Data Analysis steps:

1. Ask
2. Prepare
3. Process
4. Analyze
5. Share
6. Act

Story telling - turning facts to narrative

Steps: Define your audience, collect the data, filter and analyze the data, choose a visual representation, shape your story, gather feedback.

Data visualization - graphical representation of data. eg. graphs, maps

KPI - a measurable value/metric that demonstrates how effective an organization is at achieving key objectives.

Dashboard - a visualization of project progress

To give an effective presentation you should be precise, flexible, and memorable.

Leadership and influencing skills

Work groups - people in an organization who work toward a common goal(coordinated, controlled/assigned by a single person)

Teamwork - an effective, collaborative way of working in which each person is committed to and heading toward a shared goal. It fosters creativity, accountability, gets work done

Factors that impact team effectiveness are:

• Psychological safety
• Dependability
• Structure and clarity
• Meaning
• Impact

Leading functional teams:

1. Create systems that turn chaos into order
2. Communicate and listen
3. Promote trust and psychological safety
4. Demonstrate empathy and create motivation
5. Delegate responsibility and prioritize.
6. Celebrate team success

Bruce Tuckman’s stages of team development:

1. Forming
2. Storming
3. Norming
4. Performing
5. Adjourning

Ethical leadership - a form of leadership that promotes and values honesty, justice, respect, community and integrity. Fostering culture of respect and creating equal opportunities to succeed

Influencing - ability to alter an individual way of thinking.

Four steps of influencing:

1. Establish credibility - expertise and relationship
2. Frame for common ground - how to provide value.
3. Provide evidence - provide hard data and story telling
4. Connect emotionally - connect personality and appreciate work.

Power sources - organizational, personal, reputation

Personal powers -knowledge, expressiveness, history, character

Effective project communication

State what you want clearly, keep the content short and concise, structure your writing, check grammar, punctuation and spelling.

An effective meeting is structured, intentional, collaborative, inclusive

Types of projective meeting:

1. Project kick-off
2. Status updates - task, schedule, budget, risks, changes
3. Stakeholders reviews
4. Project reviews

Closing a project

When to close:

1. Assure all work is done
2. Agreed upon project management processes are executed
3. Formal recognition and agreement that the project is done by key stakeholders.
4. Never-ending project
5. Abandoned project

Steps in closing:

1. Provide necessary training, tools, documentation and capability to use your product.
2. Ensure that the product has satisfied it’s goals and desired outcome.
3. Document acceptance from all stakeholders
4. Review all contracts and documentation.
5. Conduct a formal retrospective
6. Disband and thank the project team.

Impact reporting

Agile project Management

Fundamentals of Agile

Waterfall - sequential or linear ordering of phases

Agile - moving quickly and easily, flexibility and willingness to change and adapt(iterative, flexible, accept change)/.

Agile project management - an approach to project and team management that embodies “agility” and is based on the agile manifesto.

Aspects of a project: Requirements, documentation, deliverables

Four Values of Project Management

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation.
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
4. Responding to change over following a plan.

Twelve Principles of Agile Manifesto

• Value delivery - how do agile teams deliver highly valuable products to their customers.
• Business collaboration - how do agile teams collaborate with their business partners and stakeholders to create business value to organizations.
• Team dynamics and culture - how does a team create and maintain the right interpersonal and team dynamics to deliver value for the customer and the business.
• Retrospective and continuous learning - how does the project learn to continuously increase performance of an organization and business.

VUCA(volatility - rate of change, Uncertainty - lack of predictability, Complexity, Ambiguity - possibility of misunderstanding) - an acronym that defines the conditions that affect organizations in a changing and complex world.

1. Value Delivery

   1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
   2. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to a shorter timescale.
   3. Working software is the primary measure of progress
   4. Simplicity - the art of maximizing the amount of work not done is essential.’
   5. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhance agility.

2. Business Collaboration

   6. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer competitive advantage.
   7. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

3. Team Dynamics and culture

   8. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support their needs, and trust them to get the job done.
   9. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
   10. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
   11. The best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self organizing teams

4. Retrospectives and Continuous learning

   12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, the tunes and adjusts it’s behavior accordingly.

SCRUM

Forming a team that will work together to quickly develop and test a deliverable.

Product backlog - the central artifact in scrum , where work is done.

Daily scrum/stand-up - a meeting of 15 or fewer minutes every day of the sprint.

Scrum master - responsible for ensuring the team lives agile values and principles, follows the processes and practices that the team agreed to, sharing information to the larger project team.

Product owner - Responsible for for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the team, responsible for the inventory work and has final say on how to prioritize work.

Development team - Responsible for how the team will deliver the product.

Reasons for scrum popularity

1. Clear roles and responsibilities, while continuously emphasizing the power of the team as a whole.
2. Regular and predictable meeting and delivery schedules, formats and outcomes.
3. Support and reinforces the agile values and principles, while adding structure and foundation that help new agile teams get started and more experienced teams get better.
4. Free and open for all to use. Huge amounts of online guidance and support, as well as scrum-specific training and certification.

Agile - Scrum, kanban, xp, lean.

Benefits of kanban

1. Provides transparent visual feedback
2. Ensures that the project team only accepts a sustainable amount of in progress work.

Work-in progress(WIP) Limit - tasks are limited to what the team can actually handle during a certain amount of time.

Backlog > Creating > Review > Publishing > Done

Flow - a core principle of kanban that aims to maximize efficiency.

Extreme Programming(XP)

Improve product quality and the ability to respond to changing customer needs.

Takes best practices for the development to “extreme” levels.

XP activities.

1. Designing(simplicity)
2. Coding(clear and concise code)
3. Testing(eliminate flaws)
4. Listening(listening to the customer feedback and act)

XP innovative practices.

1. Pair programming
2. Continuous integration and continuous re-factoring
3. Avoid big design upfront.
4. Write tests, not requirements.

Lean

Five principles of Lean:

1. Define value - identify and focus on customer needs
2. Map value stream - map steps to production, eliminate waste.
3. Create flow - product flow through value stream, eliminate waste.
4. establish pull - customer is asking for features and increment deliverables.
5. Pursue perfection - improve the first for processes.

Blending methods.

• Kanban - focus on visualization and managing flow
• XP - concerned with taking product development best practices to an extreme degree.
• Lean - capture core principles that eliminate waste and deliver value to customers.

Waterfall phases

1. Initiation
2. Planning
3. Executing and completing tasks
4. Closing the project.

Scrum 101

scrum is the main agile framework

Scrum guide - a main source of truth for scrum teams and is available at scrumguide.org

Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering and sustaining complex products.

Iterative - repeating cycles.

Incremental - work is divided into small chunks that build on top of of each other.

Empiricism -the idea that the knowledge comes from actual lived experience

Pillars of scrum are Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation.

Five values of scrum

1. Commitment - personal commitment to achieve goals
2. Courage - courage to do right things and do tough work, honesty.
3. Focus - focusing on necessary work.
4. Openness - open about work and challenges.
5. Respect - respect opinions, skills and independence of teammates.

Essential scrum roles include:

• Mission - a short statement that stays constant for your team throughout the power and gives them something to work toward.
• Product vision - what team is responsible for and team boundaries.
• Product owner -build the right thing.
• Development Team -build things right.
• Scrum master - coach the team members on agile and scrum best practices, rules and values, helping to find ways to manage the product backlog effectively, facilitate scrum events, help team remove blockers, prevent unhelpful interactions from outside the team.

Scrum masters

1. Organizational skills
2. Supportive leader
3. Facilitate productivity and collaboration.
4. Coach team members
5. Create communications

Product owners

1. Continuously maximize the value of the product delivered by the scrum team. Act as a voice of the customer in the team.
2. Help the scrum team understand why their work matters within the overall goal and mission.
3. Prioritize the product backlog to optimize delivery and value to customer
4. Ensures the backlog is visible and transparent to all.
5. Make sure the product/services fulfills the customer needs

A product owner should be:

1. customer focused
2. Decisive
3. Flexible
4. Optimistic and positive
5. Available
6. Collaborative

Developer team

People doing the work to build the product (3-9 people).

1. Cross-functional
2. Self-organizing
3. Supportive
4. Customer oriented

Implementing scrum

Five scrum events:

1. Sprint
2. Sprint planning
3. Daily scrum
4. Sprint review
5. SPrint retrospective

Product backlog - guide and roadmap of your product. It’s a living artifact, owned and adjusted by the product owner, prioritized list of features.It consist of:

1. The description
2. The value it generates
3. The order(highest to lowest priority)
4. The estimate

User stories - are short, simple description of a feature told from the perspective of the user. It consist of user, action and benefit. eg.” As a (user role) I want to this (action) so that I can get this (value).

Epic - a group or collection of user stories.

Acceptance criteria - the checklist you will use to decide whether the user story is done.

Backlog refinement - the act of keeping the backlog described, estimated, and prioritized so that the scrum team can operate effectively. Ensures:

1. It contains the appropriate items and nothing new is needed or nothing to be removed.
2. That the items are prioritized by the product owner.ie. called settings the order field.
3. That the items at the top of the backlog are ready for delivery with clear acceptance criteria.
4. The backlog items include estimates or an informed assessment about how much work a particular backlog item will be.

Relative estimation - instead of trying to determine exactly how long a task will take, we compare the effort of that task to another task, and that becomes the estimate.

Types of estimation

1. T-shirt estimation
2. Story points estimation
3. Planning poker
4. Dot voting
5. The bucket system
6. Ordering method
7. Affinity mapping

Sprints

Within a sprint, the amount of work is planned based on historical capacity of the team and is made ready for the sprint planning event.

Timeboxes creates a sense of urgency which will drive prioritization, provide a window focus which will translate into productivity gains, help the team develop a predictable rhythm to their work. Think about frequency of changes, the backlog item, how much overhead goes into a “delivery” of your product.

Sprint planning - the entire scrum team comes together and meets to confirm how much capacity, meaning time and people are available during this sprint.

Definition of done -refers to an agreed upon set of items that must be completed before a user story or backlog item can be considered complete.

1. The code