Oak Road Project Management
Project activities within the boundaries of time, cost, and scope.
Waterfall project management
A traditional methodology that is sequential and requirement focused, with each project stage completed before moving onto the next.
Agile project management
A framework that prefers a faster and flexible way of working, as opposed to waterfall. It is iterative and incremental in response to changing requirements.
Scrum
An approach used in agile project management, which focuses on teams, daily standup meetings and sprints, which are short iterations of work.
How can we help you with your project?
- Scope Management:Defining the work needed to complete the project
- Task Management:Planning tasks and defining their deliverables
- Resource Management:Using people, capital, materials and all other resources efficiently
- Team Management:Assembling and leading a team
- Schedule Management:Consists in analyzing the duration of activities to create a project schedule. Once the execution phase begins, the project status must be monitored to update the schedule baseline
- Quality Management:Establishing a quality policy for the project’s deliverables and implementing quality assurance and quality control procedures
- Cost Management:Estimating costs and creating a budget
- Stakeholder Management:Satisfying stakeholders expectations and communicating with them throughout the project life cycle
- Risk management:Identifying, monitoring and minimizing project risk
- Status Reporting:Monitoring and tracking progress and performance by generating reports and other documentation
Project Initiation
This is the starting phase of your project when you must prove the project has value and is feasible. This stage includes creating a business case, to justify the need for the project, and a feasibility study to show that it can be executed within a reasonable time and cost. This is also the time to create a project charter, a document that sets out exactly what the project is going to deliver.
Project Planning
The second stage is project planning, which occurs after the project has been approved. The deliverable of this phase is the project plan, which will be the guide for the execution and control phases. The project plan must include every component associated with the execution of the project including the costs, risks, resources and timelines. During this phase, the work required to complete the project, which is known as the project scope, is defined using a work breakdown structure (WBS). The WBS divides the project into activities, milestones and deliverables. This allows project managers to create schedules and assign tasks to their team members. Project managers often visualize their project plan using a Gantt chart, which represents the order of tasks and how they are interdependent. This gives you a roadmap for the work until the project reaches its conclusion.
Project Execution
The third stage is project execution, which is where the majority of the work happens. This is the phase where you complete the project activities and milestones to produce the deliverables to the client’s or stakeholder’s satisfaction by following the plan created in the previous stage. Along the way, the project manager will reallocate resources as needed to keep the team working. They will also work to identify and mitigate risks, deal with problems and incorporate any changes
Project Monitoring and Control
The fourth stage is project monitoring and control, which occurs at the same time as the execution phase of the project. It involves monitoring the progress and performance of the project to ensure sure that it stays on schedule and within budget. Quality control procedures are applied to guarantee quality assurance. The biggest issues in a project are typically related to three things—time, cost and scope, which collectively are referred to as the triple constraint. The main goal of this phase is to set firm controls on the project to ensure that those areas don’t go off track.
Project Closure
The fifth stage is project closure, in which the final deliverables are presented to the client or stakeholder. Once approved, resources are released, documentation is completed and everything is signed off on. At this point the project manager and team can conduct a post-mortem to evaluate the lessons learned from the project and learn from the experience. Depending on the project, the closure phase may also include handing over control to a different team, such as the operations management team. In this case, it is the job of the project manager to ensure that such a transition occurs smoothly.
