Introduction

The primary objective in publishing the Wayne State Project Management Process Guidelines is to facilitate projects:

  1. Completing on time.
  2. Completing within budget.
  3. Making sure they meet customer requirements.

To achieve that end, a series of standard documents and definitions have been created in the following documentation. The format of this documentation was created to offer a recommended timing of the use of the forms and to explain the meaning of key terminology used on all projects.

One of the most important things to understand is that a successful Project Management process requires flexibility because not all projects are executed the same. The population of projects has:

  1. Different staff resources with different personalities and skill sets.
  2. Different stakeholders with different goals and objectives that sometimes conflict with each other.
  3. Different attitudes from management on the importance or priority of the different projects that are worked on at any given point in time.
  4. Varying levels of product and approach knowledge.
  5. Varying levels of experience with requested functionality.
  6. Varying levels of experience with recommended technology used to implement a requested project.

And Project Management is a discipline that is best exercised by Project Managers and Leads who are experienced with the components of the process and can recognize how and when to execute the components. The documentation contained in this process is not intended to be a cookie cutter approach where all of the components are executed in a straight forward and pre-defined way. For example, the Project Initiation portion of the process calls for identifying the project risks. However, when beginning a new project, not all of the risks are known and additional risks will be recognized during the execution of the project. The documentation attempts to define the procedures of the process as they relate to how to use each of the forms. It also attempts to acknowledge that flexibility in the judgment of when to use the forms is required.

The question is "Why is all of this so important?" Recent research reveals that 44 percent of project managers do not know what percent of their organizations projects came in on time; Sixty-four percent do not know what percent of their projects came in as budgeted; it only gets worse: Eighty-four percent did not know what percent of their projects met requirements specifications. And when it comes to project activities such as estimating, the reason the estimates are so bad is not because of the math. It's primarily the behavioral aspects that get ignored. Consider this: don't spend the money learning how to do the math (with whatever sophisticated software is out there!) when you might be learning how to "do" the people (who are far more intelligent!). Moreover, there is a variety of statistics that portray the percentage of failed projects caused by:

  1. Poor user input.
  2. Stakeholder conflicts.
  3. Vague requirements.
  4. Poor Cost and Schedule estimation.
  5. Skills that do not match the job.
  6. Hidden costs of going "lean and mean".
  7. Failure to plan.
  8. Communications breakdowns.
  9. Poor architecture.
  10. Late failure warning signals.

There is no easy answer to the question posed above and the Project Management process does not provide absolute solutions to each encounter of these causes. However, it does is provide a consistent framework that addresses most of the causes of failure and provides the necessary basis for bringing a complete portfolio management solution to Wayne State University.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) is the guiding force for Project Management practices and standards that are used throughout the world. The Project Management Book of Knowledge will serve as the basis for most of the Project Management materials that are used at Wayne State.