Creating Your Risk Management Plan

Risk management is a project management process that helps defend against the potential damaging events. Risk management also helps you identify opportunities for your project. This aspect is an important one in risk planning since a lot of people focus on the negative aspects of risks. Although doing something innovative or new with your project could be a risk if it doesn’t work properly, your organization may ultimately revolutionize technology that leads to far more profit or opportunity than expected. In order to manage risk management activities, you need to create a plan. This plan describes the strategy you will use for your project in relation to risk. It describes how much time you will spend, how your team will work on risk, the measurements you will use to describe risk, and why you are taking the time to manage risk.

The major steps of risk management are:

Creating a risk management plan (RMP).

Identifying risks.

Analyzing risks.

Creating a risk response plan.

Monitoring and controlling risks throughout the project.

Elements of the RMP
An RMP should contain at least the following eight elements that will help your project team members understand how they need to manage risk.

Methodology Describes how you will manage risk management. Your team and stakeholders need to understand the purpose and objectives of the risk management strategy. What are the processes the team will follow to perform risk management? What kind of analysis will you use for your risks? Will you hire consultants? Will you use expert judgment, or will you use sensitivity analysis? Will you keep it simple, or due to the complexity of your project, will you need to put a lot of time and expertise into managing risk, including bringing in outside consultants or the organization’s risk management experts? In this section, you will describe in detail how you are going to manage risk and why.

Roles and responsibilities Describes who will be in charge of the risk management plan, and who will be in charge of risk management responses. This step identifies the overall management team (such as the project manager or independent facilitator being the lead), and who will analyze the risks and implement risk response plans if a negative or positive risk event occurs. This responsible party is often a functional manager, or someone who understands the risk well, who has the subject matter expertise, or who has the authority to be able to gather the resources to analyze and respond appropriately and quickly.

Budgeting Describes how much the risk management process costs. If you are going to hire a risk management expert and have her or him manage the process and have meetings every two weeks, that will cost something toward project management processes. The project may simply by complex enough to warrant a larger budget. In small projects, the risk process might be a part of the weekly status meeting, and the project manager ensures that risk discussions continue regularly in the project team meetings. The budget would be small, but appropriately relative to the complexity of the project.

Timing Describe how often the risk management processes will occur on the project. This may also reflect different timing for different phases in the project. For instance, you might meet once a week during the concept phase, once a week during the design phase, and twice a week during the implementation phase. You might also plan some kind of independent Risk Identification to be performed early in the design phase.

Scoring and interpretation How will you rate and react to risks you identify? You will come up with a method to rate the probability of a risk occurring, and the impact it will have on the project. This process has to be done before you actually start identifying and rating the risks on your project. Completing this step ensures that your team has a consistent understanding so when the rating processes occurs you are not debating how you will score risks while you are in the midst of the process itself.

Describe thresholds Defines which risks will be addressed. You could have a big list of risks. You cannot work on all of them, or your budget would be astronomical. This process describes the thresholds of risks you will work on. For instance, you might work on all risks that have a greater than 50 percent probability of occurring. Or ones that have a combined probability and impact of greater than .25 rating. You would possibly base this on your organization or stakeholder tolerance for risk.

Reporting formats Describes your Risk Identification and response reporting and how you will communicate risk processes and results to your stakeholders. You will see more about formats in Exercise 7.7 when you create a risk response plan. This step might also include describing risk performance reporting and its processes for your executives. You may have one format for your team, and another format for executives.

Tracking Describes the process for how you will track your project’s risks. You might describe your risk management database that will store and track risks. You will also record the benefit of risk management results for lessons learned.

Once you understand the components of a risk management plan, you should be ready to learn the steps involved with creating a risk management plan.

Creating a Risk Management Plan (RMP)
In risk management, you will hear the term “risk response plan,” which is how you plan to actually respond to particular risks. However, a risk management plan is a road map for how you and your team will deal with risk processes and how you plan to analyze and manage risks. The two are vastly different kinds of plans but both are important outputs of the risk management process. Following are the steps you’ll need to take to create a risk management plan.

Decide on and document your processes and strategy for risk management based on the following questions. Is it new technology? Is it extremely difficult or financially risky? Is it a large project? Is the customer extremely “finicky?” Create a methodology around risk to match the complexity of the project. Don’t forget to see if your organization already has risk management processes, guidelines, or expertise.

Create a risk management team.

Get input from the team and stakeholders and other risk management experts about best practices and how they would like to see risk managed on the project.

Assign risk management roles and responsibilities. You will select leads for each risk, and it is often best to pick a functional manager, or someone with expertise that could help analyze a risk, then put a plan in place to take care of the risk. Create a roles and responsibilities matrix for risk and include it in the plan. The following table provides an example of a risk roles and responsibilities matrix.

Scenario of Risk Management Plan
TPMP is helping Mountain Communications (MC), a well-established telecommunications company, create risk management processes. One of your first assignments is to create risk planning for a project that is replacing two old systems with newer systems to reflect modern technological advances. The old systems will need to continue functioning while data is converted. The new systems are provided by a vendor who is asking MC to be one of the first companies to implement them. The MC company has decided to use a gateway program, which will convert the old data into the formats of the new systems. The company has decided to create this program itself, although several are available on the market. The program is critical to both conversion efforts, and a plan has been created for a phased conversion—the data will not be converted all at once—MC has been able to segment the data to be converted over the next couple of years. The project has around 100 people working on the conversion and implementation of the new systems. Some of the team members are the program manager, Tasha Smith (whom you are advising to establish the risk management processes); the production manager who is responsible for the current systems and will take over the new systems; a development manager responsible for the gateway program; another development manager responsible for implementing the new systems and managing the conversion plan; the client who will need to maintain current service while the new systems are converted; and the vendor who is helping to implement both systems.

Closing a Project Management Professional

There are two kinds of project closings: when the project is terminated before completing all work and when all the work of the project completes. In the project closing process, you will verify that all the work has completed that needed to be completed according to the project’s requirements. You will archive the project’s data, receive formal acceptance for the project, perform a project lessons learned, and release the resources on the project (including the project manager!). You do this even when a project has terminated early—the process establishes a record of where it ended and if by some chance it gets picked up again (yes, it can happen), then it will be much easier to restart. If the project is terminated early, it is especially important to perform a lessons learned.

You can use the following steps to close a project:

Review the project plan to ensure that all phases have been completed to satisfaction. You might also conduct an independent audit for the project.

Gather measurements and reports that describe project performance.

Prove project completion or provide justification why the deliverable was not needed or the phase did not complete with all expected deliverables.

Receive approval from the customer or sponsor for project closure.

Archive the project files.

Hold lessons learned as soon as possible near project close. Try to get participation from as many stakeholders as possible. You might have to request time from team members who may have already been reassigned to another project.

Document the lessons learned in a nonjudgmental way, and share the information with the rest of your organization. Try to implement as many improvements in other projects as possible. If you found tasks or processes that should be added to other projects, think about including those tasks or processes to project schedule templates or project plans.

Contract closeout is part of Procurement Management but it is closely related to project closing, and is probably worth talking about here. You would perform many of the same functions to close the contract as the project itself, but you would ensure the terms of the contract are completed, including ensuring final payment and written approval. You will make sure you keep a contract file (especially if there could be legal repercussions at some point), and you might perform a procurement audit to create a lessons learned on the contract and to help rate the vendor for future considerations. Contract closeout would be performed prior to the full project closure and maybe one of the inputs to it.

Closing a Project or Phase

Closing is one of the most neglected activities in project management. Project managers are often assigned the next project or ready to move to the next phase of a project and just can’t take the time to properly verify all the activities of the phase or do everything to close down the phase or project. So it is important to actually plan closing into your project schedule, and set up the verification and measurement deliverables around the closing activities. Closing means closing a phase or a project, not just closing the project down. In this exercise, we will explore closing for both processes.

Closing a Phase
First, for closing of project phases, a closing process ensures you have performed all activities for the phase. You might pass through a phase gate, a stage gate, or a kill point according to your industry practices. After the work of the phase is complete, and measurements have been reviewed, a group of decision makers decides to move on to the next phase, possibly make some corrections to the current phase, and sometimes, cancel the project entirely if warranted. You may have moved onto the next phase already, because the team needed to get started on the next phase, but you still need to close out this phase. At this point, you might also conduct a lessons learned to explore what you could have done better. This information can be used for another project going through the same type of project phase. Completing one phase of a project is also a good place to celebrate with the team. Here are some specific steps you can take to close a phase in a project:

Make sure you understand all of the deliverables and quality audits that must be passed to move out of a phase. The deliverables should be in your project plan.

Gather measurements and reports that describe project or phase performance.

Create a checklist based on the deliverables and associated measurements completed showing their success. Prove completion or provide justification why the deliverable was not needed.

Receive approval from the customer or sponsor for the end of the phase and to move on to the next phase.

Store the documents from the phase in your project files. If they are to be changed, make sure you have a good process and justification for the changes.

Hold lessons learned as soon after the phase completion as possible. Try to get participation from as many stakeholders as possible.

Document the lessons learned in a nonjudgmental way, and share with the rest of your organization. Try and implement as many improvements in other projects as possible.

Creating a Performance Report Project Management Professional

Now that you know the types of performance reports and what goes into them, you can use the following list to create a performance report.

Decide on information that needs to be communicated: schedule, budget, quality, risk, procurement activities, or scope changes.

Decide on the kinds of measurements and when you will take them. You will need to make sure you baseline your schedule.

If using earned value, use tools that will help you generate the data regularly. Find a scheduling tool with an earned value reporting capability to capture earned value regularly.

Decide on the best form to communicate the information based on the needs of the audience. You will probably want to create a combination of status report, text, and charts or graphs. Executives usually prefer charts and graphs, so you would want to create a standard chart/graph for you performance reports.

Schedule performance review meetings regularly, discuss the variances, and decide on corrective action if it is required.

Earned Value Analysis Project Management Professional

Planned value (PV, also known as BCWS) Budgeted cost of work scheduled. This is what most of us understand as our budget. It is the estimated cost of what you thought it would take to get the task or project done. This may be reported on the task itself or for the entire project.

Actual cost (AC, also known as ACWP) Actual cost of work performed. This is what most of us think of as actuals. It is the cost incurred up to a particular point in time of the project. You capture this from labor performed, and include expenses if they have been applied. Again, you can report this on the task or project level.

Earned value (EV, also known as BCWP) This is the value of a task or project applied at a particular time. The work accomplished is worth something even if it is not completely done. Note that you have to initially establish how you are going to measure earned value. Some organizations decide work does not have a value until it is 20 or 50 percent done and it would have an earned value of zero until it is at least 20 percent or 50 percent done. Some have decided it needs to be 100 percent done before value can be applied.

The following formulas are what you will use to calculate variances and forecast completions using planned value, actual cost, and earned value.

Cost variance (CV) This formula tells you if costs are higher or lower than budgeted. The formula is CV = EV – AC. For instance, if the earned value for the documentation project is $1,605 (the outline and some writing have some earned value as of the status date), and the actual costs are $2,120 on the status date, the CV is <$515>. If the cost variance is a negative number (as shown with the angle brackets <>), the project is over budget. If it is a positive number, the project is under budget. Zero is right on target.

Schedule variance (SV) This formula tells us if the project schedule is behind or ahead of its estimate. The formula is SV = EV – PV. For instance if the earned value for the documentation project is $1,605, and the planned value is $1,550, the SV is $55. If the schedule variance is a negative number, the project is behind schedule. If it is a positive number, the project is ahead of schedule. Zero is right on target.

Performance Reporting, Including Earned Value Analysis

Once your project gets underway, you need to communicate where it stands and how it is progressing to your sponsor and other executives on your project. It’s important to provide the executives objective measurements. You need to measure progress objectively based on the major elements of the project: cost, schedule, and quality (performance) within the current scope. You may also report on procurement and risk. You might have regularly scheduled performance reviews showing progress with reports, graphs, and charts.

Performance Reporting
There are various forms of Performance Reporting to choose from, including:

1. Performance reviews
2. Variance analysis
3. Trend analysis
4. Earned value analysis

We will briefly discuss performance reviews, variance analysis, and trend analysis in this section; however, in this exercise, we will stress earned value analysis as the primary performance reporting method. We will discuss earned value analysis in detail separately.

Creating a Communications Plan Management Project Management

The best way to communicate consistently and in an organized form is to write down your communications plan. First, you need to create a plan describing the types of communication you will distribute and the methods by which you will distribute them. You will need to describe the strategy and tactics you are using for communication in this plan. If your project is complex, and you have many stakeholders, your strategy and tactics for communicating will need to be far more formal and organized than if your project is small and you have few stakeholders. You will also create a communication matrix as part of this plan, which will list all of your communication methods and the stakeholders who will receive the communication. You will describe the communication forms and when they will receive their information.

Components of a Communication Management Plan
A thorough communications management plan incorporates many details. First, you need to determine how and where you will store your project information. You need to decide the structure of the filing methods you will be using: electronic or hard copy. This plan will be published to team members so they know how to get information, and where they should store the project information they create. Your plan for storage should also include procedures for documentation and communication management.

Your communications plan should include a communication matrix explaining who receives information, what the information is, when it will be distributed, and how it will be distributed. Also, you need to provide your team members with a description of the format and content for each of the kinds of information that will be distributed. For instance, if you listed status report for one of the information types, you would describe the data that will be captured in the status report. This matrix makes you pre-plan all of the formats you will use. You may also include a schedule for each type of information so it’s clear when it will be produced.

Your team will need procedures for getting information between regularly scheduled communications, and you need to provide the methods for updating the communications plan itself as the project proceeds.

Creating a Communication Management Plan
Creating a communications plan is absolutely essential on a medium or large-sized project, and by sticking to it you’ll prove to your organization that you are consistent and in control of the communication and, by implication, the project itself. Following are the steps you should take to create a communication management plan:

Decide on an overall strategy for your communication. You will need to describe how you are going to handle communication and why. For instance, you might state that you are going to manage communication on a very formal basis, with meetings and follow-up documents at all times, because you have a large project. You might state that you will require a part-time communication manager on your project because of its complexity, or that you may need help from the public relations staff because you will publish information to the media.

Describe how you will store information and how your team will retrieve information. For instance, you might state that you will keep all documents on the network drive and provide the directory name and file structure for all the project information. This policy will keep the directory from becoming unusable because people put documents wherever they think they should. You should also provide procedures as to how the team or stakeholders should use this structure.

Create a communication matrix. Make sure you create it thoroughly, by answering the basic questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how. You might consider including the following information: what is the information (such as status report), who will use the information (per stakeholder groups), when will it be published (such as weekly, as needed, or daily), and how the stakeholders will receive it (such as via e-mail attachments, presentation, or meeting). You will have an example form to use for your exercise. You might even think about creating the matrix for each phase of the project (concept, design, execution, finish) because the information needs and frequency may change.

Create a form and example content for each type of information listed in the matrix above, or refer to where the form can be found. For instance, create a status report form. Show all of the fields of data you want to be included, such as dates covered, objectives and accomplishments for the status time frame, hot topics, issues, or action items. Make sure you describe what would go into each field.

Describe procedures for how your team and stakeholders will request and obtain information outside of normal distribution times. For instance, by detailing that the media must contact the PR department first if they have a question, everyone on the project will know what to tell the media if they should get a call from a reporter.

Describe in the communication management plan how changes will be made and approved for the plan itself. If you have found you need another form of communication as you move into the execution stage, you will need to write a procedure to ensure your team knows about the new communication form, and that you add the information to the plan itself.

Deciding on Information Distribution Project Management

Once you know who you need to communicate to and something about their needs, you need to decide on what you will distribute and how you will distribute the information. You might take an inventory of what forms of information you can create and the methods your organization has (or which you can obtain) for distributing information.

First, what kinds of information will you distribute? The list could be almost endless and could include some of the following information: status/progress; escalations; issues; risks and risk response plans; quality standards; project processes and standards; contracts; change requests; scope statements; team directory; work breakdown structure; schedule or budget and their variances; requirements; specifications; user guides; test plans; reports; project charter; responsibility and organization charts; and a project plan.

Second, you will then decide on how the information will be distributed, such as e-mails, written memos, formal or informal meetings, presentations (including charts and graphs), conference or video calls, websites, instant messaging, videos, TV, press releases, faxes, voicemail, articles, brochures, announcements, phone calls, and speeches.

Not only do you need to think about how you push information to your team or other stakeholders, you also need to consider the way your team or stakeholders will pull information when they need to get to it. Do you store all your information on a website or in an electronic database? Or do you store it in a project management software files, or in an electronic directory, or in hard copy via a file cabinet or notebook? Some of these decisions might be based on the need for archiving files or corporate policies.

The decisions about what and how information is distributed may be based on how often and how formal the information needs are, your organization’s capabilities, or your people’s skills, and confidentiality and need to know. Do people need information updated frequently, or can people wait for a week? If your team is not trained in reading and using a project schedule, you may need to find a simpler form for communicating status and progress rather than using a Gantt chart. Or you may need to find project management training for the team.

What’s more, you need to match the right kind of information, with the right kind of audience, at the right time. For instance, although you may create a status report, you may find you need to design two kinds of status reports: a detailed status report for the team involving the status of each of the team’s deliverables for the week and an overview of major deliverables, budget, and escalations for executives. The format for each may also be entirely different so that the team sees the detailed schedule and executives see only a high-level milestone report.

Last but not least, you need to decide how you can get information to people when they request it outside of the regularly scheduled times or stakeholders have special requests for information you don’t normally provide. In other words, you need to create an information distribution strategy. Following are some guidelines on how to create an information distribution strategy:

• Decide on your major forms of communication for the various types of information you will be creating. For instance you might have a written status via presentations for executives; and meetings, issues, and updated schedules for your team meetings.
• Decide on the technology or method you will use to distribute the information: e-mail, Internet, written memos, or a directory structure on the network.
• Decide how often you will distribute your different forms of information. You might start forming a matrix for this kind of information that will eventually be complete in a communications plan (discussed in the next exercise).
• Let the team members know where all the information is, where they can put their information, and how they can get information when it’s needed.

Planning and Managing Team Communications

Knowing that communication, feedback, and conflict resolution are such an important part of maintaining an effective project team, you should keep the following considerations in mind when planning and managing your team and its activities:

• Estimate the number of communication channels on your team. This will help you better define how complex your communications will be and how consistent and organized you must be.
• Take an inventory of your communication skills, and develop your listening skills. Practice active listening regularly.
• Think about the types of communication you will use and decide on how you will use them. You will probably want to use verbal communication in status meetings as you discuss issues informally, but to record the decisions, you will want to write them down in some kind of weekly report.
• Study and understand the methods of resolving conflict. When you resolve an issue with a method other than problem solving, ensure you understand why, and the possible consequences.
• Practice conflict resolution using the problem-solving method as much as possible.

Communicating with the Team as a project manager

As the project manager, one of your most important jobs will be to effectively communicate with the team so your team members understand their particular contributions to the project and you can keep them focused on the goals of the project. You need to understand the complexity of communication and how you use various forms of communication, including listening, to provide information to and receive information from your team. Finally, you need to help your team resolve differences using various conflict resolution methods.

Lines of Communication
Communication is a very complex activity, often taken for granted. The following formula illustrates the lines of communication (also called communication channels) that can exist based on the number of people involved on a project:

[n x (n – 1)] ÷ 2

where “n” is the number of people on the team who will be communicating.

This means if you have five people on your project, there are 10 lines of communication. Team members on the project don’t just communicate to the project manager, but also with each other. When they communicate with each other, the chances for miscommunication and distortion increase. If you have 20 people on the project, then there are 190 lines of communication—quite an increase for only 10 more people. These lines of communication keep growing exponentially and could become very difficult to manage if you don’t have a plan and a consistent method of managing the communication.


Feedback
There is a basic model of communication based on a sender encoding a message and receivers decoding the message. Perhaps the most important aspect of this model is that there needs to be feedback: You can’t expect to just send information out and that everyone will understand. And the receiver has some responsibility in understanding the message. The receiver needs to do something to confirm he or she understands the communication as you intended. So, using the terms of the model, the sender formats the message to be sent (encoding it in a way that can be decoded by the receiver). The receiver, or in this case, your team member, might “filter” the information to perceive the message according to his or her mindset as learned by culture, language, or emotions. But it is their duty to try to describe what they perceived so you can confirm the communication as you intended it. Important items need to be communicated often, too. People usually don’t get the message once. That’s why commercials play over and over again— the media has figured out that messages aren’t received the first time. You as a project manager need to remember it too: important information needs to be repeated. You will need to repeat important information like milestones, quality expectations, changes, the project goals, or job expectations.

You also need to understand the forms of communication—whether they are formal or informal—so you can use them in the appropriate situations: you will make decisions on whether your communication should be verbal, nonverbal (pictures or gestures), or written, depending on the situation. Become aware of your communication habits. You may frown a lot while you listen and folks may interpret this as disapproval, while you may be just listening hard—you may need to change that habit to have a more open look on your face. And as a project manager you will need to tune your listening skills: you will need to practice active listening (keep an open mind while listening—don’t formulate responses in your head), eye contact, gestures showing interest (like nodding), recapping what was said, and not allowing interruptions.

Conflict Resolution
As a project manager, you will also get the chance to practice conflict resolution. Most people have some natural reactions to conflict, but as project managers, you need to actively use problem solving as much as possible. The following five terms describe possible conflict resolution methods you may choose to apply.

Forcing One person tries to force their point of view to solve a problem on another. The opinion is usually imposed by someone with authority. It solves the conflict temporarily, but your team or the person who is on the receiving end continues to harbor issues.

Smoothing Emphasizes agreement, choosing to ignore the disagreement. Again, this is a temporary solution, because you or your team have not worked through the disagreement and solved the issue more thoroughly. The issue may resurface again.

Compromise Allows those who disagree to come to some kind of satisfaction when each party gives something up. This method provides for a grudging agreement, and although this may be a permanent solution because everyone makes a commitment to it, there might have been a better solution.

Withdrawal One of the parties avoids conflict by leaving or avoiding it so the conflict doesn’t get resolved. The project manager needs to look out for this kind of situation: you might need to have more discussions with the team to keep working on the issue. This is one of the worst forms of resolution, because no one wins and the problem will continue.

Problem solving (Confrontation) Getting to the bottom of the issue and resolving it to everyone’s satisfaction. Usually, you use the problem solving techniques of analysis, alternatives review, recommendations, and finally coming up with the best solution based on fact. This is the best way to solve conflict.

Creating a Stakeholder Needs Matrix In PMP

Now that you know some of the criteria behind stakeholder analysis, you can create a stakeholder needs matrix. To do so, follow these steps:

Identify criteria as needs and expectations for your stakeholders. Items may be:

Does he or she care about quality over everything else?

Does he or she care more about results than other aspects of the project?

Does he or she care more about technology than other aspects of the project?

Does he or she have the ability to impact the project positively or negatively?

Does he or she care about its cost or profit-making potential?

Does he or she require special care? (You might need to indicate that this person might need some special care to help achieve success on the project.)

Does he or she care more about the project making its scheduled date above all else?

Does he or she deal well with change? (If not, you may need to build in some special steps to help him or her with the change.)

Does he or she have scope approval or influence?

Does he or she need special recognition during the course of the project to feel more valued?

Is he or she an influencer, decision maker, performer, expert, or nonessential who needs information only?

Does he or she demonstrate the ability and desire to help solve problems (this means you might have someone to call on to help when you need to solve a problem)?

Is he or she people-oriented?

Does he or she need one-on-one meetings to help motivate or clarify project goals and tasks?

Decide on ratings (high/medium/low or 1 through 10) for each of the criteria so you can rate its importance to the stakeholder.

Identify each and every individual and organizational stakeholder that you and your team can think of. Don’t forget to include people who are external to the organization such as the government or media. Include a brief description for each person or organization with this list.

Interview as many stakeholders as you can, and find out their expectations and needs for the project. Using a questionnaire with the criteria will help—you may also find you need some additional criteria as you talk with stakeholders.

Create a matrix for your stakeholders so you understand their needs better and are able to understand the influence they will have on your project. This matrix will help you make better decisions about how to communicate with them.

How to do Stakeholder Analysis

Once you identify all the stakeholders (and this could be quite a list, depending on the complexity of the project), you need to identify their driving needs and expectations. Some may only need to know about what’s going on with the project, whereas others will be decision makers or influence project direction or outcome even if they do not have decision-making power on the project. It’s important to understand these needs and expectations early in the project and how they might change over the course of the project. Some people may have different expectations in the planning phase than in the controlling phase of the project. If you do this identification and analysis upfront, you will not be as easily swayed or pulled in different directions as the project progresses. Defining stakeholders, depending on the sensitivity of the data gathered, may be a tool only you would use to help define your communication plan (described in a later exercise). You will also find that you need to update your analysis throughout the project as the stakeholders change or you get to know them better. Some expectations or needs to consider are:

How important is cost and profit to the stakeholder?

What kind of information will they require?

How important is the schedule to the stakeholder?

Is quality important to the stakeholder?

Will the project threaten or enhance his or her position or organization in any way?

Is the stakeholder a major player in scope change?

Does he or she care more for results or more for how people are affected?

What are the major issues or risks at stake for this stakeholder?

How much influence does the stakeholder have? Can he or she threaten the success of your project?

Is the stakeholder a performer, influencer, decision maker, technical or subject matter expert, or nonessential to the project but interested in it?

How often do they need information about your project?

When do they need to be included in the project or when are they most impacted during the project?

Communication Management

First, you need to identify and analyze all of your stakeholders. Knowing your stakeholders helps you think about their needs and expectations, which is important so that you can figure out what kind of communication you need to have with them and how often you need to communicate. Next, you need to decide how you will communicate with your team. You will also decide on how you distribute the information (for instance, on what kind of media will the information be distributed). You need to create a communications plan detailing how and when you will communicate with your stakeholders. This plan includes a communication matrix that you will use to organize your communication with your team and stakeholders. You need to decide how you are going to report on your project’s continued performance. Performance reporting will focus on earned value, an important measurement process in project management. Finally, in the last exercise highlighting closing processes recommended by PMI, you will learn about project closeout.

Reward and Recognition Systems

The second primary tool and technique of the team development process is reward and recognition systems. This technique describes what you will use to incentivize the team to outstanding performance. You will need to design your rewards and recognition systems at the beginning of the project. Communicate the plan to the team members so they understand “what is in it for them” to complete the project successfully. The key to a rewards and recognition system is doing what you promised. If you have promised a day off for extra work, be sure to let the person have the day off. The first time you do not reward as you said, the system will be destroyed because trust in the system will now be lacking. You would then need to redesign and reapply a new system.

Team-Building Activities, Team Development

Team development is the only human resource management process that is performed in the executing portion of a project. Team development deals with how a project team performs together to create the project deliverables. There are four primary tools and techniques of the team development process. They are team-building activities, reward and recognition systems, collocation, and training. We will discuss each of these tools and techniques, as well as how to decide when each should be used.

Team-Building Activities
Team-building activities are any type of planned activities that increase the comfort level of the team in working with each other. There is a substantial body of literature published on this subject. Project managers need to be well aware of the types of activities that are available through this literature. Team-building activities can be as simple as a group lunch or as complex as daylong facilitated sessions. Project managers should use team-building sessions at three different points in the team development process.

Initiation As soon as the project team is assembled, team-building activities should begin. Sufficient time should be devoted to the team-building work at this stage. These activities will serve as a foundation to move the team through progressing stages of development.

New team members Anytime a new team member joins a project, the dynamics of the team will change. Project managers need to be aware of the effects of adding new staff. It may be necessary to incorporate team-building activities back into the work plan.

Conflict Conflict is normal and desirable on projects. It allows the team to resolve problems and find the right solutions for successful project completion. There are times though when conflict lasts longer than necessary and is a detriment to project completion. This may be a time to use team-building techniques to resolve the conflict and bind the team into a better performing group.

Identify potential barriers to getting your target team.

You will need to understand why you may not be able to get the right people for your project. Examine the following possibilities:

Availability of the people you want—Jose is your top candidate for Task 62. Jose is constantly sought after for projects because of his expertise and work ethic. What strategy will you use if Jose is not available when you need him?

Your relationship with the functional manager—You have found Jose’s boss Mary to be difficult to work with. How will you work with her to come to a win-win solution that will benefit your project and her?

Your authority as a project manager—Organizations give project managers different levels of authority to run their projects. What is your authority to staff your project? How strong are your influencing skills?

Your organization structure—Organizations can be established as functional or as projectized, with many variations in between. Functional organizations have clear reporting relationships, where a subordinate usually has one supervisor. Projectized organizations are created to support project work and most of the people are doing project work.

Identify your target team in Job Section

If you could have the best people for your project, who would they be? Step through your WBS and examine the staffing requirements outlined in your staffing management plan. Determine the right person for each task. Have a fallback plan by identifying one or two people who also could do the task yet may not be as desirable as your first choice.

How to Acquiring Staff in Project Managment

Staff acquisition is a key planning process for completing the human resource management processes. In staff acquisition, the project manager gathers inputs of the staffing management plan, staffing pool descriptions, and the organization’s recruitment practices and uses three tools and techniques to put the project staff into place. Those three staff acquisition tools and techniques are negotiations, pre-assignment, and procurement. We examine each of these in this exercise.

Negotiations
One of the necessary skills a project manager must have is negotiating. This skill is highly utilized during the staff acquisition process.

Creating a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM)

Using the information provided for the Operation:NFL project, answer the following questions about creating a RAM.

1.
What does the acronym RAM mean?

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2.
What is a RAM?

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3.
What two components make a RAM?

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4.
Why might you use a legend in creating a RAM?

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Answers :

1.
The acronym RAM stands for responsibility assignment matrix.

2.
The RAM is the integration of an organization chart and project tasks that creates a planning tool that describes who will accomplish what on a project.

3.
A RAM is created by merging an organization breakdown structure with a work breakdown structure.

4.
A legend can be used in a RAM to describe project team roles.

Creating a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM)

Project planning requires the integration of many different types of information to plan the project effectively. The responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) is an example of merging two different knowledge areas, integrated to create a planning output. The RAM combines an organization chart with project tasks and creates a planning tool that describes who will accomplish what on a project. These components are an organizational breakdown structure and the work breakdown structure. Let’s examine the two components more closely.

Organization breakdown structure An organizational breakdown structure is really nothing more than a project organization chart. It needs to depict who is working on the project and the departments they represent.

How to Creat a Staffing Management Plan

Using information provided for the Operation:NFL project, answer the following questions about creating a staffing management plan.

1.
What is the definition of a staffing management plan?

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2.
What are the three types of project interfaces?

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3.
What are the three inputs into a staffing management plan?

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4.
Why would you include an organization chart in a staffing management plan?

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5.
Why would you include a roles and responsibilities matrix in a staffing management plan?

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Answers

1.
The staffing management plan documents for the project team exactly how the human resources will be assigned to a project, what they will work on, and when they will depart from the project.

2.
Project interfaces can be organizational, technical, or interpersonal.

3.
The three inputs into a staffing management plan are project interfaces, staffing requirements, and constraints.

4.
You would include an organization chart in a staffing management plan so the project team understands the reporting relationships on the project.

5.
You would include a roles and responsibilities matrix in a staffing management plan to make it clear who is accountable for what on the project.

Resource assignment matrix (RAM)

A resource assignment matrix is a diagram that merges an organization breakdown structure and the work breakdown structure.