Studying for the PMP: Part 2 — Project Performance Domains

Overview

• Group of related activities to ensure delivery of project outcomes
• Interactive, interdependent, and interrelated
• Specific activities will be determined by project context, stakeholders, etc…
• Review PMBOK 6th ed. Fig. 1-1

Stakeholder Performance Domain

• Addresses activities and functions associated with stakeholders

• You want:

  1. Productive working relationship with stakeholders
  2. Stakeholder agreement with project objectives
  3. Beneficiary stakeholders are satisfied, while opposition stakeholders don’t negatively impact the project

• Stakeholder Engagement Cycle:

  1. Identify - who are your stakeholders and what do they want (ongoing)
  2. Understand and Analyze - seek to understand stakeholder feelings and values
  3. Prioritize - focus on stakeholders with the most power and interest
  4. Engage - collaborate with stakeholders to introduce the project, gather requirements, manage expectations, resolve issues, negotiate, prioritize, problem solve, and make decisions
  5. Monitor - as the project progresses, stakeholders change and so do their requirements.

Checking Outcomes

Team Performance Domain

Deals with activities and functions associated with the people doing the project work.

• Outcomes:

  1. Shared ownership
  2. A high-performing team
  3. Appropriate leadership and other interpersonal skills

• This domain also includes establishing the culture that enables a set of diverse individuals to be a high-performing team.

• Related terms:

  1. Project Manager - team lead, responsible for the project
  2. Project Management Team - others involved in project management
  3. Project Team - the people doing the project work

• Management activities include:

  1. Meeting project objectives
  2. Effective planning
  3. Monitoring work
  4. And others…

• Leadership includes:

  1. Influencing
  2. Motivating
  3. Listening
  4. Enabling

• Leadership can be centralized or distributed

  1. Centralized: Accountability assigned to one person
  2. Distributed: Shared among a project management team and team members

• Servant Leadership: Understanding and addressing the needs of your team. Be a servant to your team.

• Servant leaders ask themselves:

  1. Are project team members growing as individuals?
  2. Are project team members becoming healthier, wiser, freer, and more autonomous?
  3. Are project team members more likely to become servant leaders?
  4. Are project team members encouraged and enabled?
  5. Have you removed obstacles for your team?
  6. Have you provided the necessary resources to your team?

• Team Development includes:

  1. Vision and objectives - everyone aware of objectives and vision
  2. Roles and Responsibilities - members understand and fulfill their responsibilities
  3. Project team operations - facilitating project team communication and problem-solving
  4. Guidance - everyone is heading in the right direction
  5. Growth - what can the team do better

• Project Team Culture:

  • Project teams naturally develop distinct cultures.
  • PM’s job is to form a positive culture.
  • Positive behaviors include:
    1. Transparency
    2. Integrity
    3. Respect
    4. Positive discourse
    5. Support
    6. Courage
    7. Celebrating success

• High-Performance Teams have:

  1. Open communications
  2. Shared understanding and ownership
  3. Trust
  4. Collaboration
  5. Adaptability
  6. Resilience
  7. Empowerment
  8. Recognition

• As a leader, you should:

  1. Establish and maintain a vision
  2. Apply Critical thinking
  3. Motivate your team
  4. Exercise interpersonal skills (EQ is a hot topic!)
  5. Make proper decisions
  6. Properly manage conflicts

• You need to tailor your leadership based on:

  1. Experience with that type of project
  2. Maturity of project team members
  3. Organizational governance structures
  4. Distributed project teams

Checking Outcomes

Development Approach / Life cycle

• Deals with activities and functions associated with the development approach, cadence, and life-cycle phases of the project.

• Delivery cadence: Timing and frequency of deliverables

• Outcomes include:

  1. Correct development approach
  2. A project life cycle that connects the delivery of business value with stakeholder value
  3. Project life-cycle composed of phases that facilitate project deliverables

• Projects can have a single delivery and some can have multiple deliveries

  • Multiple deliveries can be periodic

• Common Approaches:

  1. Predictive (i.e. waterfall)
  2. Adaptive Approach (i.e. agile)
  3. Hybrid

• Factors to determine approach:

  • Dealing with the product:
    1. Degree of innovation
    2. Certainty of requirements
    3. Scope stability
    4. Ease of change
    5. Delivery options
    6. Risk
    7. Safety requirements
    8. Regulations
  • Dealing with the project:
    1. Stakeholders
    2. Schedule constraints
    3. Funding availability
  • Dealing with the organization:
    1. Organizational structure
    2. Culture
    3. Organizational capability
    4. Size of the team

• The life-cycle: The type and number of project phases

  • Life-cycle example (software):
    1. Feasibility
    2. Design
    3. Build
    4. Test
    5. Deploy
    6. Close

Checking Outcomes

Planning

• Activities and functions associated with ongoing coordination necessary for delivering project deliverables
• The purpose of planning is to proactively develop an approach to create deliverables
• Outcomes include:
  1. Project moves in an organized and deliberate method
  2. Holistic approach to project outcomes
  3. Progressive elaboration
  4. Time spent planning is appropriate
  5. Planning is sufficient to manage stakeholder expectations
  6. There is a process to handle changing plans
• Because projects are unique, planning varies for each project.
  • Project planning variables include:
    1. Development approach
    2. Project deliverables
    3. Organizational requirements
    4. Market conditions
    5. Legal or regulatory considerations
  • Project planning considerations:
    1. Delivery - scope of deliverables
    2. Estimating - scope, schedule, budget, people, resources
    3. Schedules - models to determine when work should be done
    4. Budget
• Planning for building a team starts with identifying required skills to complete the project
• Communication plans must include stakeholder analysis and engagement
• Physical resources are resources other than people
• Procurement planning must happen throughout the project
• Plan on how to deal with changes (i.e. a change plan)
• Plan for risks that may be encountered

Checking Outcomes

Work

• Deals with activities and functions associated with establishing project processes, managing physical resources, and fostering a learning environment
• All to do with performing the project work by the project team
• Outcomes:
  1. Efficient and effective project performance
  2. Project processes are suitable for the project and environment
  3. Appropriate stakeholder communication
  4. Efficient management of physical resources
  5. Procurement management
  6. Continuous learning and team learning
• Good planning includes:
  1. Managing the flow of existing and new work
  2. keeping the team focused
  3. Establishing efficient project systems and processes
  4. Communicating with stakeholders
  5. Managing physical resources
  6. Working with external vendors
  7. Monitoring changes
  8. Enabling project learning
• Must periodically review your processes with the team
• Process tailoring can be used to optimize for the context
• Balance constraints like timelines and budgets to keep the team on track
• Communicate and engage with stakeholders
• Third-party resources must be accounted for
• Physical resources need to be actively tracked
• Manage procurement and vendors (bids, contracts)
• Monitoring new work and changes
• Retrospectives and lessons learned

Checking Outcomes

Delivery Performance Domain

• Activities and functions related to delivering the scope and quality expected of the project
• Outcomes include:
  1. Project contributes to business objectives
  2. Project realizes the outcomes
  3. Project realized within the time frame
  4. Project team has an understanding of requirements
  5. Stakeholders accept the deliverables
• Some projects deliver throughout and others deliver at the end in bulk.
• PM must understand how the project provides value by:
  1. Requirements gathering
  2. Evolving and discovering requirements
  3. Managing requirements
  4. Define and decompose the scope
• Quality is the ultimate factor in project completion.
• Quality is reflected in:
  1. Completion criteria
  2. “Definition of done”
  3. Statement of work
  4. Requirements documentation
• Cost of Quality:
  1. Prevention - hiring better people
  2. Appraisal - managing quality (ongoing)
  3. Internal failure - cost of failure from internal sources
  4. External failure - cost of failure from external sources

Checking Outcomes

Measurement Performance Domain

• Activities and functions associated with assessing project performance and maintaining acceptable performance

• Outcomes include:

  1. Reliable understanding of project status
  2. Actionable data to enable decision making
  3. Timely and appropriate actions to keep the project on track
  4. Achieving targets and generating business value

• This domain bridges the Delivery Performance Domain with the Plan Performance Domain.

• We measure for many reasons:

  1. Evaluating performance compared to plan
  2. Tracking utilization of resources
  3. Demonstrating accountability
  4. Providing information to stakeholders
  5. Assessing whether project deliverables will meet customer acceptance criteria
  6. Assessing whether project deliverables are on track

• Creating effective measurements helps ensure the right things are being measured

• Ways to measure:

  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
    • Leading indicator - predicts changes or trends
    • Lagging indicator - measures deliverables or events
  • Utilize SMART
    1. Specific
    2. Meaningful
    3. Achievable
    4. Relevant
    5. Timely
  • Create a range: what is acceptable and what is unacceptable

• What to measure:

  1. Deliverables
  • Errors or defects
  • Measures of performance
  2. Delivery
  • Work in progress
  • Lead time
  • Cycle time
  • Process efficiency
  3. Baseline performance
  • Start and finish dates
  • Actual cost compared to planned cost
  4. Resources
  • Planned vs. actual resource utilization
  5. Business value
  • Cost-benefit ratio
  6. Stakeholders
  • Mood chart
  7. Forecasts

• Presenting metrics:

  1. Dashboards
  2. Information radiators (common in software teams)
  3. Visual control

• Pitfalls with measurements:

1. Hawthorne effect - working to pass a specific measure/test rather than the actual requirements
2. Vanity metric - judging team performance based on one metric
3. Demoralization - common outcome of vanity metric, team feels demoralized
4. Misuse - misrepresenting a metric (very easy to do unintentionally)
5. Confirmation bias - measuring in a way that fits your bias

Checking Outcomes

Uncertainty

• Deals with risk and uncertainty
• Outcomes include:
  1. An awareness of the environment around the project
  2. Proactively exploring and responding to uncertainty
  3. Awareness of interactions between many variables and the project
  4. The capacity to anticipate threats and opportunities
  5. Project delivery with little or no negative impact
  6. Opportunities are realized to increase project performance and outcomes
  7. Cost and schedule reserves are used
• Projects happen in environments with varying uncertainty
• Shades of uncertainty:
  1. Risks - not knowing the future
  2. Ambiguity - not aware of current or future conditions
  3. Complexity - dynamic systems with unpredictable outcomes
• Responding to uncertainty:
  1. Gather as much data as possible
  2. Plan and prepare for many different outcomes
  3. Build-in resiliency
• Volatility exists in environments subject to rapid and unpredictable change
  • Can also occur when resources and skills are fluctuating

Checking Outcomes