While some in the alternative project management community have found credible issues with PMBOK (risk management for one. The explicit lack of agile in another), there is a simple approach to get value from this 387 page document. Starting with the knowledge areas in the 3rd Edition, assess how each area could, should, or would be used to benefit your project
- Integration Management
- Scope Management
- Time Management
- Cost Management
- Quality Management
- Human Resource Management
- Communications Management
- Risk Management
- Procurement Management
1. Integration Management
- What are all the activities that are performed in the project?
- Does everyone on the project know about them, their role in them, their accountabilities for them?
- How is this information communicated to the project members?
- How are changes to these processes managed? How gets to approve the changes. In the current IT Governance paradigm, these are called decision rights?
2. Scope Management
- What does "done" look like?
- What are the units of measure of "done?"
- How are changes to "done" managed?
- Who gets to say we're "done?"
- How much does done cost? How long will it take to "done?"
3. Time Management
- What is the duration of all the activities we're doing on the project?
- What order - if any - should these activities be performed?
- What resources will be needed to perform these activities?
- Are there any special arrangements needed for these resources?
- How will we control changes to the schedule of activities and assignment of resources?
4. Cost Management
- What's the estimated cost of this project?
- What budget is available to cover these cost?
- How will this budget be spent as a function of time?
- How will we control the costs so as to stay within our budget?
5. Quality Management
- What's our plan for producing the needed quality from our activities?
- How can we be assured that we're producing the planned quality?
- How can our activities be controlled to assure that our efforts produce quality results?
6. Human Resource Management
- What skills will we need for this project?
- Where will we find them?
- Once we've got the right people, how can they be put to work in the best way?
- What additional training is needed?
7. Communications Management
- Who has to know things about the project?
- How do we communicate with them?
- What kinds of information do they want to have?
- How is this communication made? On what intervals?
8. Risk Management
- What are the risks to the success of the project?
- What's the plan to mitigate them?
- Who's accountable for these mitigations?
- How can we tell these mitigations are working?
- How much will these mitigations cost and how long will they take?
- What resources will we need to perform these mitigations?
9. Procurement Management
- If we have to buy things for the project, how is this done?
- What contract vehicles will be used for these procurements?
- How do we receive the materials, pay the vendors, and close out the contracts?
These are "sample" questions that need to be answered by what ever project management process is used. No matter what process - extreme, radical, agile, feral, structured, or what ever. It's not project management if you're not doing these processes in some way or another.
