Subtitles of the Movie

In the previous movie you were introduced to the process groups in more detail. We covered a few more high-level details and reviewed the initiating process group. We'll move on to the planning process group next. By the way, as a side note, you can find this introductory information of the process groups within the PMBOK Guide. If you're using the Fourth Edition, turn to page 37, which is the start of Chapter 3. You'll find this information and more within this chapter. But let's now move into the largest process group; planning. Planning consists of 20 of the 42 processes. Its purpose is to define the project objectives and to develop the course of action required to attain those objectives. The planning process group is where the project management plan is created, which consists of several subsidiary plans and component plans. Let's take a look at the 20 processes. We have develop project management plan, collect requirements, define scope, create WBS, define activities, sequence activities, estimate activity resources, estimate activity durations, develop schedule, estimate costs, determine budget, plan quality, develop human resource plan, plan communications, plan risk management, identify risk, perform qualitative risk analysis, perform quantitative risk analysis, plan risk responses and plan procurements. Notice that they're laid out in front of you by knowledge area and by that I'm referring to the subject that connects them. For instance, define activities, sequence activities, estimate activity resources, estimate activity durations and develop schedule all belong to the time management knowledge area; a very important area for the PMI SP Exam. This should raise a big flag that the majority of the time management knowledge area processes occur during the planning stages of the project. There are so many processes that make up planning that I won't be able to go into them in too great of detail but I will run through the purpose of each so that you have an idea and a refresher on what each sets out to achieve. Develop project management plan, just as the name implies, is the process where the project management plan is created. As you can imagine, it's one that gets revisited often as the subsidiary plans are generated and refined. In some cases the planning takes place over time through the progressive elaboration. As more information becomes known, additional planning takes place. Remember that the processes are iterative. Next is collect requirements. Here the needs of the stakeholders are defined and documented. Of this, the requirements are determined, which are necessary to meeting the project objectives. Carefully and thoroughly identifying these requirements is important to making sure that the project goals and expectations are well understood, else it will come back to haunt you later on within the project. Define scope is where a detailed project scope statement is generated. Future project decisions will be based on this project scope statement. It helps to create project boundaries and prevent scope creep. Create WBS, which refers to work breakdown structure, is where the project deliverables are divided into smaller, more manageable components. We'll cover the WBS in detail as part of this course. You'll need to understand the WBS and this is important and it'll help you practice as well. PMI has a standard for creating work breakdown structures. As a PMI member, you can download it in the same place as the practice standard for scheduling. Next, we have define activities. This is one of the important processes to this course since it relates directly to scheduling. The four processes that follow also relate to scheduling. Define activities is where the activity list is created, which contains the activities to be performed. Since planning is so large, let's go ahead and pause this move here and we'll cover the process group within two parts. We'll continue with planning in the next movie.