3.3 PMBOK Core Areas

Figure 3.4: PMBOK Core areas

• Quality Management – processes and activities to determine quality objectives, responsibilities, policies for the project to satisfy the needs of stakeholders. Implementation of a quality management system with continuous process improvements.

Main asset: Quality management Plan containing metrics, checklists and an improvement plan.

• Activities

  • Plan Quality to identify requirements and standards for the project, to get aware of how the project will meet those

  • Perform Quality Assurance to audit the quality requirements, examine the quality properties and act to ensure that all needed quality control processes are used

  • Perform Quality Control to execute quality activities and ensure that all defined processes are in place and met. Assess the performance of the quality process and recommend necessary changes.

• Time Management - to get the project done on time and within budget (more time spent results in cost increase)

   

Main asset: time management plan containing time management processes and tools. Schedule management plan, which is a subsection of the project plan.

• Activities

  • Define the Activities to identify specific actions to produce deliverables by using the requirement and organizational process assets

  • Sequence the Activities to document relationships amongst activities by using an activity and milestone list

  • Estimate Activity Resources to have an overview on the material, equipment and personnel needs of each activity. Achieve that by using expert's judgement and bottom-up estimation

  • Estimate Activity Durationsto estimate work periods to complete milestones using an activity list and activity resourcing sheets

  • Develop a Schedule to get an overview on sequences, durations and meet schedule constraints using the relations amongst activities

  • Control the Schedule to adjust leads and lags by monitoring the status and making adjustment in changing the schedule baselines.

• Cost management – estimating, budgeting and controlling costs for the project to not exceed the planned and approved budget. Includes the change management processes of costs.

  Main asset: Cost Plan with activity cost estimates, work performance management plan

  • Activities

    • Estimate Costs – approximation of project costs on a per task basis, based on the needed resources and materials to fulfill all project needs

    • Determine Budget – summary of cost estimation of individual activities to logically related work packages to establish a cost baseline

    • Control Costs – monitoring cost status, updating costs by managing changes

• Scope Management – to ensure that the project includes all the needed tasks defined without any unnecessary ones

  Main asset: list of detailed requirements, Requirements Management Plan contained in the project plan.

  • Activities

    • Collect Requirements – create a requirements management plan and requirements documentation. Requirement elicitation can be done using interviews, workshops, prototypes, observations. Needed to be able to meet stakeholders' expectations and project objectives.

    • Define scope – create a detailed description of the project and on the resulting product. Can be achieved by using product analysis, expert's judgements and/or facilitated workshops

    • Work-break-down structure creation – creating granular, easily manageable tasks. Using task decomposition to create a task set.

    • Verify scope – create change requests and update project documentation by using inspection on the documents and interviewing stakeholders with different techniques.

    • Control the scope – to avoid increasing or decreasing the scope, create change requests if any new requirements or new tasks are arising from the documentation.