Project Documents

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.

For the exam, it is important to know that the project documents are regularly updated by different project management processes.

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 in 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 a project completion date, milestones, costs, etc. The approval process becomes less difficult if the project manager has identified all the stakeholders, their requirements and project’s 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 the 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 the project’s deliverables. A kickoff meeting should be held before the completion of the Develop Project Management Plan and before initiation of project execution. The review of the project may include milestones, risks, communication management plan, meetings schedule, among others.

Direct and Manage Project Work

Integration of all execution work to accomplish the project management plan and producing the deliverables are two critical activities of Direct and Manage Project Work. Requesting changes and completing the work necessitated by approved change requests are involved in Direct and Manage Project Work.

Direct and Manage Project Work process and the Monitor and Control Project Work process require considerable effort during the project. Direct and Manage Project Work process involves:

• Managing project members/ stakeholders/others

• Executing tasks

• Process improvements

• Change management

• Helping the team to get the work completed

• Ensuring the team is calibrated, focused and informed

Direct and Manage Project Work may not be talking about the entire execution of a project management plan, it may just be referring to the integration piece of project execution.

In Direct and Manage Project Work process, the role of a project manager involves:

• Effective facilitation

• Effective communication

• Keep the project on-track as per schedule

• Increase efficiency by performing process improvements

For the tasks performed by the project manager, it is assumed that during project execution, enough time is spent on managing schedule, budget, quality, risks and all knowledge areas. Most project managers are not attuned to this approach of managing projects. They tend to manage the project as a whole instead of giving attention to individual knowledge area. This also indicates that enough time is not given to understand the impact of one knowledge area on another area (e.g. quality management issues can affect risk management and project schedule). In due course, the project managers also miss out to think about some knowledge areas. This makes integration management knowledge area as one of the most critical areas that require project managers to keep all the knowledge areas in mind at all times.