The first phase in any project management process is project initiation, where the goal is to uncover the project’s scope — the boundaries for resources, expectations, results, feasibility, the team, and your requirements — and produce a project charter.  Now that you know the project’s goals and scope and you have a project charter, what’s next?

Project planning is the second phase of any project management process and consists of developing the core planning elements.  The output of this phase is a set of project management documents, or plans.  The most important one is the project plan itself.  (Figure 1 shows the table of contents for a project plan.)

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Last week, we learned about the five phases of project management.  Each phase of project management has a distinct purpose, importance, and set of outputs designed to ensure that the project manager is moving the project towards the desired results.  The first phase is Project Initiation.

Phase I – Project Initiation

The primary purpose of Project Initiation is to discover the project’s scope — where are its boundaries?  As you see in Figure 1, you need to determine and document the User Requirements & Project Assumptions, produce a Business Case Justification & Feasibility Study, and put together a Project Charter and Project Team.

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Your management system consists of business processes that interact with each other through documents and records.  Yet in many companies the system appears to be functioning whether anything is documented or recorded.  Can this be an effective management system?  It depends on the process management maturity of your organization.

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Part 3 of a four-part series

Are you solving problems or improving the process?

In other words, if you find a problem in a process and implement change to fix it, then did you improve the process? Well, maybe… Sure, solving problems may be an important thing to do, but

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Part Three of Cash to Cash Cycle Series

We’re sprinting toward that $1,000,000 mark…and we’re only a couple strides away;

Decreasing inventory carried us over the first hurdle, and last week reducing Accounts Receivable sped us through the half-way mark. We’re making great time, so let’s

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