PMGT1865 Chap.1 Project Planning, Life Cycles and Project Scope
Project Planning, Life Cycles and Project Scope
Week 1 sets the vocabulary every later calculation assumes. A project is a set of coordinated activities run once so as to bring into being some product, service or outcome that did not exist before, and a methodology is the framework that walks a team through its phases. This unit works in the traditional waterfall tradition and uses the Project Management Body of Knowledge as its map. Four things get fixed here.
The five phase life cycle, in which each phase exists to hand the next one something it cannot start without, and in which planning produces the comprehensive plan that every method in this guide computes on. The ten knowledge areas, of which schedule, cost, resource and procurement are the four the unit takes apart and scope is the input to all of them.
The fact that planning looks different in a large engineering project, a business transformation and a dynamic environment, so a method is chosen rather than applied. And project scope: what is inside the boundary, what is deliberately outside it, and the three directions from which pressure on that boundary arrives.
What this chapter covers
- 01
A project as coordinated activities producing a unique product, service or result, and what a methodology adds to that
- 02
The five phase life cycle: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing
- 03
What each phase hands the next, and why the fifth runs alongside the third rather than after it
- 04
The two curves under the life cycle: resource commitment per period, and the rising cost of a change
- 05
The ten knowledge areas, and the four this unit works inside
- 06
How the process group and knowledge area grid relates to the newer performance domains
- 07
Planning for large scale engineering, for business transformation, and in dynamic environments
- 08
Product scope against project scope, and why both have to be estimated
- 09
The five substantive fields of a scope statement, including the two students leave blank
- 10
Scope creep: business, technological and customer pleasing, and its four results
Classifying and pricing a scope change
- +1Classify the pressure. The request comes from a user representative wanting a better outcome for borrowers, and no messaging requirement appears in the approved scope. This is customer pleasing creep, and naming it is not an insult: it tells the sponsor the request is legitimate and unfunded.
- +1Price the work rather than the quote. Twelve days at $900 is $10,800 of vendor cost, plus the project's own effort to specify, test and accept it. A change priced only at the supplier's invoice is priced wrong.
- +1Test it against the constraint that binds. Contingency exists for known unknowns inside the agreed scope, not for new scope. Spending it here leaves no cover for the migration risk, which is the largest uncertainty still outstanding.
- +1Decide, and say what the decision costs. Recommend deferring the request to a separately funded second release and recording it in the change log rather than declining it, which keeps the capability alive and protects the contingency.
Key terms
- Project
- A coordinated body of work run once, so as to bring into being a product, service or outcome that did not exist before. The word unique is what separates it from operations, and it is why every project carries uncertainty that has to be planned for rather than assumed away.
- Project life cycle
- The five phases a project passes through: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. Each exists to produce something the next cannot start without, which is why the order is not merely conventional.
- Knowledge area
- One of the ten standing categories of project work, from integration and scope through schedule, cost, quality, resource, communications, risk and procurement to stakeholder management. Every method in this unit belongs to one of them.
- Product scope
- The features and functions that characterise the product, service or result the project delivers. It describes the thing that exists at the end rather than the work of producing it.
- Project scope
- The work that has to be accomplished to deliver a product with the specified features and functions. Council approval, site selection and procuring a builder are project scope and none of them appears in the finished house.
- Scope creep
- The incremental expansion of a project's scope, introducing requirements that were not part of the initial planning. It arrives from business, technological and customer pleasing directions, and produces budget overrun, schedule overrun, increased workload and management inefficiency.
- Scope statement
- The document recording the scope description, top deliverables, acceptance criteria, constraints and assumptions, alongside the project name, sponsor, manager and approval dates. The constraints and assumptions are the fields that carry the most weight and are most often left empty.
Project Planning, Life Cycles and Project Scope FAQ
Which phase do students most often leave out when listing the five?
Monitoring and controlling, because it runs alongside execution rather than after it and so does not feel like a stage. It is also the phase this unit finishes on: earned value management is monitoring and controlling expressed as arithmetic. If you can only hold four in your head, make the fifth the one that compares plan against reality while there is still time to act on the difference.
Why does this unit spend so long on planning rather than on doing the work?
Because of the two curves that run under the life cycle. Resource commitment per period peaks during execution, which is where the money is actually spent, and the cost of changing your mind rises steadily, because a change made during execution has to undo work that has already been paid for. Nine of the ten teaching topics deal with planning and control for that reason: decisions are cheap early and expensive later.
Do I have to know both the process group grid and the performance domains?
Both vocabularies appear in the unit's own materials, so recognise each and use whichever the question uses. The older framing organises work as process groups crossed with knowledge areas; the newer one steps away from that and works in performance domains such as governance, scope, schedule, finance, stakeholders, resources and risk.
The one rule that matters is not to mix them inside a single answer, because the terms do not map one to one.
What separates a strong answer on planning in different contexts from a weak one?
A weak answer lists differences between methodologies in the abstract. A strong one names a project, states what makes its environment stable or unstable, and then says what that does to a specific planning artefact: how far ahead the network is worth drawing, whether a fixed price contract is even available, how often the baseline gets reset.
The learning outcome asks you to compare implications, and an implication has to land on something concrete.
Assessment move
Learn this chapter as definitions with consequences attached, because that is how the short items are marked. Write the five phases with one line each on what they hand the next phase. Write the ten knowledge areas and circle the four this unit works inside. Write the two scopes in one line each, then the five substantive fields of a scope statement, then the three sources of creep and its four results.
Then stop reciting and start applying: take a small project of your own invention, one you could actually run, and draft its scope statement with two real constraints and two real assumptions. You will use that project in every chapter after this one, and having it in mind is the difference between memorising phase names and being able to say what happens in each of them.
For the judgement questions, practise the elimination habit: given a described situation, which classification applies and why are the alternatives wrong. Naming what a request is not is usually worth as much as naming what it is.
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