Project 4

KitchenHeavenpg139-142.pdf

138 Chapter 3 ■ Developing the Project Scope Statement

■ Contract or agreements information

■ Constraints and assumptions

Let’s look at an example of what some of the elements of a WBS dictionary entry might look like. You’ll use the work package level called Inspection and Identification defined in the sidebar “The Lincoln Street Office Building” earlier. The WBS dictionary entry for this might look like the following:

3.1 Inspection and Identification

Description of work—Inspect the building for asbestos, and identify all areas where it’s found. Update the plan for removal (WBS 2.2) with each location identified.

Responsible organization—Adrian in facilities will hire and oversee a contractor to perform this work.

Schedule milestones—Inspection and identification to start after contractor is identified and hired (no later than July 1). Work should be completed no later than September 15.

Contract information—Two contractors have been identified as qualified and experienced in this type of work. Contract process should close no later than June 12.

If the WBS and the WBS dictionary are constructed well, you’ve given yourself a huge helping hand with the remaining Planning processes. The completion of many of the remaining processes depends on the project scope statement and WBS being accurate and complete. You’ll use the work packages created here to further elaborate the work into activities. From there, you can estimate costs, develop schedules, and so on. The WBS is an essential tool for project planning, so keep it handy.

Project documents updates Project documents updates might include updates to the requirements document, which can come about as a result of changes that occur when you’re creating the WBS. You can see from the examples you’ve walked through in this chapter how new deliverables or requirements might surface as a result of working on the WBS. These requested changes should be reviewed and either approved or denied using your change control processes. The approved changes will likely change the project scope statement, the project management plan, and other project documents. These documents should be updated to reflect the approved changes.

I recommend reviewing Practice Standard for Work Breakdown Structures, Second Edition, published by PMI, to see examples of industry‐specific WBS templates, or you can modify the templates for particular business areas that may not be represented.

Heldman, Kim. PMP: Project Management Professional Exam Study Guide : Updated for the 2015 Exam, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gcu/detail.action?docID=4185201. Created from gcu on 2021-09-30 17:08:46.

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Creating the Work Breakdown Structure 139

Project Case Study: New Kitchen Heaven Retail Store

The project charter kickoff meeting was held and well attended. You’re ready to start gathering requirements and writing the project scope statement, and you have a question or two for Dirk. You knock on his door, and he invites you in.

“Shoot,” he says.

“I’m ready to define the deliverables and requirements for this project. I want to make sure I get the right folks involved in the meeting. Who are key stakeholders you recommend I speak with?”

“I can think of a few people right off that you don’t want to miss. There’s Jake Peterson over in facilities. He’s in charge of store furnishings, shelving, things like that—any supplies for the stores that aren’t retail products. He can help out with store build‐outs too. He supervised our last eight stores and did a terrific job.”

“Anyone else?” you ask.

“You should also talk to Jill Overstreet, the director in charge of retail products. She can help with the initial store stocking, and once the store is open, her group will take over the ongoing operations. All the district managers report to Jill.”

You thank Dirk and tell him you’re going to contact Jake and Jill and set up a brainstorming session to determine requirements.

A few days later.

You review your notes and reread the first draft of the project scope statement you’ve prepared for the Kitchen Heaven retail store before looking for Dirk. After your meetings with the stakeholders, you were better able to refine the project objectives and deliverables.

“Dirk, I’m glad I caught you. I’d like to go over the project scope statement with you before I give it to the stakeholders. Do you have a few minutes?”

“Sure,” Dirk says. “Let’s have it.”

“The project objective is to open the 50th Kitchen Heaven store in Colorado Springs by February 1. When I met with Jake, he confirmed it takes 120 days to do the store build‐ out. That includes having the shelves set up and in place, ready to stock with inventory.”

Dirk asks whether Jake told you about his store location idea.

“Yes, Jake gave me a contact name of the leasing agent, and I’ve left her a voicemail. The sooner we can get that lease signed, the better. It takes Jake 120 days to do the build‐out, and Jill said she needs two weeks lead time to order the initial inventory and stock the shelves. That puts us pretty close to our February 1 deadline, counting the time to get the lease papers signed.”

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140 Chapter 3 ■ Developing the Project Scope Statement

“Sounds good so far,” Dirk replies. “What else?”

You continue, “I’ve included an updated description of the products and services the new store will offer, based on the documentation that was written from the last store opening. Jill reviewed the updates to the description, so we should be in the clear there. The store will include some new lines that we’ve decided to take on—cookware from famous chefs, that kind of thing.

“Jake has already made contact with a general contractor in Colorado Springs, and he is ready to roll once we’ve signed the lease.

“One more thing, Dirk. Since we’re including the big bash at the grand opening as part of the deliverables, I talked to some of your folks in marketing to get some ideas. They are thinking we should have some great giveaways as door prizes and that we will want the food catered. They also thought having some live cooking demonstrations with some local chefs would be a good attraction.”

“Sounds like you’re on the right track. So, what’s next?” Dirk asks.

“Once you approve the scope statement, I’d like to send a copy to the stakeholders. My next step is to break down the deliverables and requirements I’ve documented here into the WBS so we can get rolling on the work of the project.”

Project Case Study Checklist

The main topics discussed in the case study are as follows:

stakeholder analysis for requirements gathering: Jake Peterson and Jill Overstreet interviewed. Needs, wants, and expectations recorded and requirements prioritized.

organizational structure: Functional organization with a separate projectized department.

constraints: February 1 date to coincide with Garden and Home show.

assumptions: These are the assumptions:

■ A store build‐out usually takes 120 days.

■ Jill Overstreet will help with the initial store stocking.

■ Jake Peterson will provide supplies for the stores that aren’t retail products, such as store furnishings, shelving, and so on, and can help with the store build‐out as well.

■ The budget for the project will be between $1.5 and $2 million.

The project scope statement includes the following:

Project objectives: Open 50th store by February 1 in Colorado Springs.

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Understanding How This Applies to Your Next Project 141

Project deliverables:

■ Build out storefront, including shelving.

■ Retail product line will be delivered two weeks prior to grand opening.

■ Have grand‐opening party with cooking demos.

Project requirements:

■ Sign lease within 14 days.

■ Offer new line of gourmet food products.

■ Have classroom space in back of store for cooking demos and classes.

constraints: February 1 date will coincide with Garden and Home Show.

fund limitations: Spend no more than $2 million on the project.

assumptions: (These are the same as listed earlier.) Decomposed deliverables into a WBS.

The WBS includes the following:

■ Level one is the project.

■ Level two is subprojects or deliverables.

■ Level three is deliverables.

■ Last level of WBS is the work package level, where time and cost estimates can be defined in the next process.

Understanding How This Applies to Your Next Project In this chapter, you dealt with the realities of life on the job. The reality is, many project managers I know are managing several projects at once as opposed to one large project. Although every concept presented in this chapter is a sound one, it’s important to note that you have to balance the amount of effort you’ll put into project management processes against the size and complexity of the project.

As a manager who prides herself and her team on excellent customer service, I have once or twice gotten my team into precarious situations because I was so focused on helping the customer that I hurt them and our department in the process. If you’re wondering how that happened, it was because we didn’t take the time to document the scope of the project and the final acceptance criteria. In one case, in the interest of getting the project completed quickly because of our customer’s own internal deadlines, we decided the project was straightforward enough that we didn’t need to document deliverables.

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142 Chapter 3 ■ Developing the Project Scope Statement

The customer promised to work side by side with us as we produced the work of the project. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and we didn’t meet the expectations of our customer. Further, after we did implement the project (two months behind schedule), we went through another six weeks of “fixes” because of the miscommunication between the customer and the project team on what constituted some of the features of the final product. There’s always a great reason for cutting corners—but they almost always come back to haunt you. My advice is to always create a scope statement and a requirements document and get stakeholder signatures on both. (In practice, small projects can include both the deliverables and requirements within the scope statement.)

Decomposing the deliverables is the first step toward determining resource requirements and estimates. A WBS is always a good idea, no matter the size of the project. I have to admit I have cheated a time or two on small projects and used the project schedule as the WBS. In all fairness, that worked out fine when the team was small and there weren’t more than three or four people working on the project. If you get many more than four people on the project team, it can be a little cumbersome to track deliverables with a schedule only. The WBS is the perfect tool to use to assign names to work packages, and it’s the foundation for determining estimates for the work of the project.

The five‐step process outlined by the PMBOK® Guide works very well. Starting with the 50,000‐foot view, the team determines the major deliverables of the project. From there, the deliverables are decomposed into ever smaller units of work. The trick here is to break the work down into measurable units so that you can verify the status of the work and the completion and acceptance of the work when you’re finished. If you have “fuzzy” WBS levels or work packages, you won’t be able to determine status accurately. In the information technology field, we have a saying about the status of projects: “It’s 90 percent complete.” The problem is it always seems that the last 10 percent takes twice as long to complete as the first 90 did. If you’ve taken the time to document a WBS, you’ll have a much better idea of what that 90 percent constitutes. The last step is the verification step where you determine whether everything you’ve identified in the WBS is absolutely necessary to fulfill the work of the project and whether it’s decomposed enough to adequately describe the work. It has been my experience that documenting the WBS will save you time later in the Planning processes, particularly developing the project schedule and determining the project budget.

I believe the most important idea to take from this chapter is a simple one: Always use a scope statement and requirements document, and always get them signed.

Summary This chapter started you on the road to project planning via the Develop Project Management Plan process, the Plan Scope Management process, the Collect Requirements process, the Define Scope process, and the Create WBS process. We covered a lot of material in this chapter. Everything you’ve learned so far becomes the foundation for further project planning.

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Exam Essentials 143

The output of the Develop Project Management Plan process is the project management plan, which is concerned with defining, coordinating, and integrating all the ancillary project plans and baselines. The purpose of this plan is to define how the project is executed, how it’s monitored and controlled, and how it’s closed.

The primary output of the Plan Scope Management process is the scope management plan. This plan is an element of the project management plan that describes how the project team will go about defining project scope, validating the work of the project, and managing and controlling scope.

The Collect Requirements process involves gathering and documenting the requirements of the project. It’s important that requirements be measurable, traceable, testable, and so on. Measurement criteria for project requirements are agreed upon by the stakeholders and project manager. Additionally, requirements should be tracked in a traceability matrix that documents where they originated, the results of the tests, the priority of the requirement, and more.

The project scope statement is produced during the Define Scope process. It describes the project deliverables. The scope statement, along with the WBS and WBS dictionary, forms the scope baseline that you’ll use to weigh future project decisions, most particularly change requests. The scope statement contains a list of project deliverables that will be used in future Planning processes.

The project scope statement contains many elements, including product scope description, product acceptance criteria, deliverables, exclusions from scope, constraints, and assumptions.

Constraints restrict or dictate the actions of the project team. Constraints usually involve time, cost, and scope but can also include schedules, technology, quality, resources, risk, and more.

Assumptions are things believed to be true. You’ll want to document project assumptions and validate them as the project progresses.

A WBS is a deliverable‐oriented hierarchy of project essentials. The highest levels of the WBS are described using nouns, and the lowest levels are described with verbs. Each element in the WBS has its own set of objectives and deliverables that must be met in order to fulfill the deliverables of the next highest level and ultimately the project itself. In this way, the WBS validates the completeness of the work.

The lowest level of the WBS is known as the work package level. This breakdown allows the project manager to determine cost estimates, time estimates, resource assignments, and quality controls.

Exam Essentials

Be able to state the purpose of the Develop Project Management Plan process. It defines, coordinates, and integrates all subsidiary project plans.

Understand the purpose of the project scope statement. The scope statement serves as a common understanding of project scope among the stakeholders. The project objectives

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