Develop Project Management Plan

The project management plan is created by completing the scope, schedule and cost baselines. As a next step, the key stakeholders and the sponsors approve the project management plan. This process of completing the project management plan that has stakeholder buy-in, is approved, is realistic, and formal is an output of Develop Project Management Plan. The signed off go through changes at a later stage though. project management plan acts as a tool to manage project on a day-on-day basis. It is a document that provides direction to all stakeholders. This plan needs to be thought through from an end-to-end perspective and should be complete.

The customer is the originator. He provides the statement of work. Organizational environmental factors provide company culture, existing systems, processes, procedures and historical information. This is used by the project manager to identify stakeholders and document project charter. The sponsor signs-off the charter and the project manager then develop the project management plan.

Project Documents

Project Documents include project charter, statement of work, contracts, requirements documentation, stakeholder register, change control register, activity list, quality metrics, risk register, issue log, and other similar documents. These may not be included in a project management plan, however, are an integral part of the project. With a few exceptions such as charter, contracts and statement of work (SOW), the rest of the documents are used by the project manager for his own needs. They may or may not be shown to the project sponsor. The sponsor will see and approve the project management plan.

Project Management Plan Approval

Formal approval is the process where a sign-off (signature) is taken from the management, the sponsor, the project team, and other key stakeholders on the project management plan. A project management plan is a formal document that defines how a project will be managed, executed, and controlled. It includes project completion date, milestones, costs, etc. The approval process becomes less difficult if the project manager has identified all the stakeholders, their requirements and projects objectives, include the resulting project and product scope in the plan, and have identified conflicting priorities and tried to mitigate them in advance.

Kickoff Meeting

The purpose of kickoff meeting is to formally announce the start of the project and to ensure everyone is familiar with its details, with the resources used, the scope and people working on it. The meeting is held to calibrate everyone's understanding and expectations of projects deliverables. A kickoff meeting should be held before initiation of project execution. The review of the project may include milestones, risks, communication management plan, meetings schedule, among others.