Monitoring and Controlling Process Group - Essentials

As a project manager, you always sit in the driver's seat of the car. So it's your job to monitor whether the car is driving properly in its lane and to intervene in things that go wrong by making controls when necessary. Because if the car goes off the road once, you will either die, get injured, or lose money and time. For projects, this is metaphorically the same. If a project does not proceed as planned and uncontrolled deviations occur in the process, that project either dies, gets injured, loses money, or loses time.

Define Activities Process

Before we reached the process of defining activities, we created a scope management plan that guides how to define the scope. Then, we defined assumptions and constraints, the scope was defined and we created a scope statement. In the previous process, we created a work breakdown structure by dividing the scope into manageable parts and reduced the work contained in the project to the level of work packages, which is a level that cannot be further decomposed.

Create Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) Process

Creating a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) as a part of the planning process of a project may seem a complicated task to you. However, WBS is not only a part of business life or project management exams. How do you handle the difficult and large-scale tasks that you may encounter in everyday life? For me, assembling a disassembled piece of furniture I bought from Ikea is a large-scale job. 

Define Scope Process in Project Management

Scope definition is a part of the delivery performance domain which consists of actions about delivering the scope and quality requirements that a project has to achieve. After the requirements elicitation, it is time to define the scope of the deliverables properly. 

Requirements Elicitation

It is absolutely impossible to create the scope of the project without knowing what the project and therefore the stakeholders need. If we decide to start a business, if we are going to deliver a product to a customer, one of the first things we need to do will always be collecting requirements. In this way, we will be more dominant in the processes that we need to do, prioritize, speed up or improve quality.

Project Management Models

All of us have a style to do things. Therefore, we all have a variety of models to use while dealing with struggles both in professional life and daily routine. Just like we can use different ways of thinking in real life, project management models exist showing us different perspectives of project management approaches.

Project management models are a variety of perspectives that depict how things work and how they should be.  Project management models can be used in any performance domain of project management. In other words, a model is "a way of thinking". We have already mentioned them in the models, methods, and artifacts section. 

Integration Management Knowledge Area

Project managers need to have a comprehensive understanding of Integration Management in order to coordinate and unify processes associated with various performance domains throughout the project's lifespan. Through familiarity and implementation of Integration Management principles, project managers can aid in guaranteeing the success and continuity of the project.

In order for a vast number of processes to be carried out together, sections of project management need to be linked, unified, and incorporated. This is named as project integration management in all project management approaches.

This area focuses on ensuring all components of the project are consolidated and interact with one another in the most effective way possible. This is done by generating a project management plan covering all elements of the project and then monitoring and controlling to ensure it remains on track.

The project manager's principal responsibility is to combine all parts of the project to create a project that runs like a well-oiled machine. Integration management is an integral element of a project manager's work, as they are tasked with ensuring that all aspects of the project work together harmoniously and that all stakeholders are kept informed.

See Also: 

What is the Definition of Project? How PMI Describes it?

 


The concept of the project is not far from our daily life or our business life. We all know pretty well what a project means, although we can't put into words what it is. We face tens, thousands, hundreds of projects in all areas of life. In our business life, we take responsibility for projects. In project management exams we come across questions about the fundamentals of a project. So in this article, we will not tell you what the project means from scratch. However, we aim to tell you with appropriate words what words we can define a project, what basic characteristics the project will have.

Every day more and more the term project imposed on our business life and daily routine. Even if it is not appropriate to a co-involve daily routine with the term project as their essences are different, so many tasks changing our routine can be considered as projects. 

Executing Process Group

Think about a project. For example, it may be a road construction project. What exactly are you imagining? Isn't that the moment when the asphalt spilled on the road, the work machines were working, the personnel was mobilized, and the work appeared? The execution process group is the face of a project. 

Scope Management Plan in Project Management

Scope management plan is a project artifact that is used as a part of;
A scope management plan is created during plan scope management process. It is an important document that you may come across in
project management exams that describes how to define, develop, measure, monitor, control, and verify the scope. It is also one of the 18 components of the project management plan.
The scope management plan describes how to manage the scope of the project and how to transfer scope changes to the project plan. The scope management plan should also include the possibility of changing the scope of the project.

All scope management plans should contain the following information. 

  • Procedures for ensuring and approving the process of creating a project scope statement. In the scope management plan, the format in which the scope notification will be created, by whom, what tools and techniques will be used and the necessary approval procedures should be explained.
  • Procedures for the process of creating a work breakdown structure, and the integrity of the work breakdown structure. The format and procedures of creating WBS should be defined.
  • Processes related to the creation of the scope baseline, the process of formal acceptance of project deliveries by the customer, and the evaluation or approval of change requests and documenting them in a change log.
  • By whom the content of the project scope notification will be created in accordance with what format,
  • How to create a organizational breakdown structure using the scope management plan,
  • Procedures for the formal acceptance of project deliveries by the customer
  • Procedures for evaluating or approving requests for changes should be included in detail.
  • Organizational process assets and enterprise environmental factors that may affect the scope of the project should be evaluated.

Plan Scope Management Process

Plan scope management process is a part of the planning process group and scope management knowledge area.

Plan scope management is the process where we determine how to define the scope of the project, what tools and techniques to use, how to approve the scope of the project team, and how to follow an approach to make changes to the scope of the project.

Plan scope management process is a project management process in which five other processes in the information field are considered with a holistic approach and how these processes are planned to be implemented. 

Plan scope management is simply the process of creating a scope management plan.  Scope management plan documents how the project scope will be defined, managed and controlled. Therefore, the key benefit of this process is that it provides you the guidance and direction on how the scope will be managed throughout the project. In PM exams, you don't need to remember all the inputs, outputs, tools, and techniques of the plan scope management process. Instead, we recommend you learn the fundamentals and the essence of these tools, inputs, and outputs. Therefore, it is %100 that you will be successful in PM exams for the questions about plan scope management.

Project Management Plan

As a project manager, I think it is important to have a comprehensive project management plan in place. According to the PMBOK, this document describes how you will achieve realistic measurements. It also describes how to monitor and control the project as well as manage and close it successfully. It has all the plans that support the overall plan. It also has reference points to measure project progress.  It is an important project artifact and should be updated regularly as the project progresses.