 Welcome to the Unit 4 Review for Strategic Project Management. My name is Dr. Lucinda Stanley. For the past couple of units, we've been looking at the phases of the project management life cycle. We'll continue that here in Unit 4, but first, a bit of a reminder of how this works. There are seven units in this course. In Unit 1, we learned what a project is, who makes the decision to take a project on, and what the triple constraint theory is. In Unit 2, we were introduced to the project life cycle. In Unit 3, we looked at the initiating phase. In Unit 4, we're going to look closely at what goes into planning a project once it's been chosen. There are a number of learning outcomes for Unit 4. The first one is all about creating a detailed project schedule by figuring out what steps need to be taken to complete the project. When we do that, what we are actually doing is decomposing or deconstructing the project as a whole and breaking it into more manageable pieces. A project manager can use a variety of tools to help them manage a project and its varied tasks, so we'll look at some of the more often used tools. Next, we'll consider what resources will be needed to complete the project. Resources include both physical resources, such as raw materials or building space, as well as the human resources or people who have the skills needed to work on parts or all of the project tasks. At this stage, we need to create a preliminary budget, so we'll have to determine the costs of all the resources needed to complete the project. Once we have a preliminary budget, we'll have some of our stakeholders analyze what we have and offer suggestions based on their experience. We'll also want to get approval for the financial resources we're going to need. Finally, we'll look at the various plans that are created to help manage all aspects of the project. Just a reminder about why learning outcomes are important. Every resource in the course can be tied back to one of the learning outcomes, which means that all assessments, including the final exam, are directly linked to the learning outcomes. Once you get to the end of the course, review the learning outcomes and see which ones you feel confident in. And if there's some that you're not sure about, it's a good idea to go back to the units that cover that outcome and review the material. This will ensure that you have all the knowledge you need to be successful in the exam. In this review, we're going to look at some definitions and walk through the planning process. While you'll find many more vocabulary words in the study guide, in this review, we're going to concentrate on these few, so keep an ear or eye out for them as they come up. Remember this graphic from the Unit 2 review? As noted in Unit 3, we're going to be seeing this over the next few units as we look at each of the five processes in the project lifecycle. Initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and controlling, and closing. In this particular unit, we're looking at planning. The most important part of the planning phase of project management is to come up with plans for completing the project. We're going to look at the various elements of the work breakdown structure, also known as WBS, and how project managers can use it to help them plan a project. The WBS is organized, is used to organize and track tasks, identify the scope of work, provide estimates for scheduling, and a preliminary list of resource requirements. It's important to note that the better and more defined the project is in the planning phase, the more likely it is that the project will end in success. The first thing to understand when planning a project is exactly what the deliverables need to be, and the more detailed, the better. If we have a detailed understanding of the scope of the project, we are less likely to experience scope creep, meaning other things that are added to the project deliverables as the project is implemented. So project deliverables are what the project team will deliver when the project has concluded. The work breakdown structure will identify anything about the project that is relevant, what the deliverables will do, what it will look like, how it should be developed, what need it will satisfy, how will users use it, and if there are any laws or regulations that must be considered and followed. The WBS will help track tasks by decomposing the project deliverables. The project manager will identify all the tasks that need to be created within a 40-hour time period and organize them into a logical sequence. For example, how would we decompose the deliverable of writing a report? Let's take a look. First, we break the project down into manageable tasks, research, first draft, revisions, second draft, then the final product ready to be submitted. There are a number of scheduling techniques that a project manager can use to help them visualize how the project is going. Often, project managers will use one of these techniques as they begin to build the project's schedule. Let's take a look at one of these. The Gantt chart was named after its creator, Henry Gantt or Henri Gantt. It's probably the simplest tool as it shows the project tasks and the time it will take to complete each task. The project manager can see at a glance where there is overlap on the project tasks. The Pert chart was developed as an enhancement to the Gantt chart and uses nodes to show the tasks of the project and what tasks are directly related to other tasks. The critical path method takes the Pert chart a little bit further and identifies tasks that must be completed before others can be started. Following the path for those tasks makes it the critical path. The ADM or OAN chart takes the Pert chart and the critical path methods a bit further still by showing the impact on the project should one or more tasks be completed early or late. Now that we've looked at the scheduling part of the project plan, let's take a look at resources. There are two types of resources a project could use, human and physical. Human resources are the human beings or people that are needed to complete the project. Human resources are anyone who has the necessary skills that are needed to complete the project. They could be the employees of the company, contractors, the company hires to perform, or all of the tasks, or suppliers who make sure the physical resources are there when the project team needs them. Let's talk about physical resources. Physical resources are any physical objects that are needed to complete a project task. They could be the raw materials needed to build a computer, it could be a piece of machinery that alters the raw materials to complete a compound, or they could be this physical space where the machinery sits as it processes the raw materials. Don't forget, there are often human resources who are using the physical resources, so they must always be kept in mind as well. In the example from the study guide, we see that we have to cost the labor of the two carpenters as well as the physical resources of the materials needed to complete the project. In this case, human resource cost would be $35 an hour for eight hours for two carpenters which equals $560. Physical resources are the lumber and nails at $1,500. This means that the total cost of both human and physical resources is $2,060. That was a pretty simple example of determining resource costs and is based on already knowing the human and physical resource costs. There are other methods that can be used to create estimates when exact information isn't available. Project or analogous estimating base a current project's estimated cost on what it costs to complete a similar project. So if it costs us $2,060 to frame the master bedroom from the last slide, we can assume the costs will be similar for a project to frame the living room, assuming the sizes are the same. Another common, if more difficult, way to estimate cost is bottom-up estimating. This basically means you must cost out each individual task or the project, even the most basic or lowest level, and add them all together to get a total cost. In our very simplistic example here, we have three tasks. We figure out the cost for each task individually and add them all together to determine that the project will cost $15,265. Now, just like building a house is more than just three tasks, most projects have many more than three tasks, which makes this method of calculating the costs to be a bit more cumbersome. All of these methods for determining costs are designed so that in the planning phase, we have the most accurate estimates we can get. The more accurate our estimates in the planning phase are, the less likely we will go over budget during implementation phase of the project. In addition to getting data from vendors, suppliers, other project managers, we can seek the help of the project stakeholders and project sponsors who may have some insight into the cost of the project based on their own experience. This is not an exact science unless we are duplicating an already completed project, and even then costs can change. The project management plan includes a wide range of many plans, some of which we've talked about already, scope, schedule, and budget, but the initial project plan will also likely have a plan on how to manage risks to the project, how to obtain the resources, both physical and human, that we need to complete the project, a plan on how to communicate project status or progress to the team and the stakeholders, how to manage the stakeholders so they're satisfied that the project is proceeding as planned, and that everything is perfect so that they don't feel the need to become directly involved in the project implementation. We'll discuss each of these in more detail as we continue on in our investigation into the five phases of the project lifecycle. In this unit, we looked closely at the planning phase of the project lifecycle by learning about the work breakdown structure, breaking the project down into manageable pieces, using techniques to see the schedule of the project, how human and physical resources are used in a project, how to cost those resources so we can create as accurate a budget as possible, and we took a look at some of the other plans that are generally included in a project plan. In unit five, we'll be looking more closely at the executing phase of the project lifecycle.