1. The problem you are trying to solve. If you do not have clarity on this then you are doomed.

2. The objective (the end point). This defines when the project will close.

3. The critical success factors (those things you have to achieve over and above the objective to make the project a success in the eyes of the stakeholders). Success is not time, cost and quality – they are constraints within which we must operate and are definitely not objectives!

4. The products you have to produce and the outcomes they will generate (hopefully to the benefit of the organisation). That is why we have a project.

5. The risks to all of the above that you have to manage. Project management is based on the management of risk.

Taking some of the points in the original article.

The base element of planning is not the task – it is the product. We carry out tasks to produce products – hence product based planning. If what you are doing does not produce anything, then why are you doing it?

We then need to understand the dependencies between the products – these dictate which tasks we will carry out and the order in which they will be done – these can be classified as activities if you prefer.

Once we have the dependencies we can look at effort and duration and begin to understand how long this project wil take and how much it will cost.

Agile is not project management it is product management – it needs an appropriate project management methodology to handle all the activities needed for success. SIx sigma is process improvement!

Bottom up means taking all the elemental products, estimating effort and costs for each and building them into a coherent whole, and demands a Product Breakdown Structure (PBS) first be produced. Top down means using similarities with previous projects when you do not have the PBS yet fully defined and gives, at best, a rough order of magnitude.

A project has one objective – an end point (it may have multiple products, many constraints and critical success factors however). The project is there to deliver the products – that is what the PM is accountable for. The sponsor will be accountable for the business case and benefits realisation. “

This post was written in response to the following article in GANTTHead –
http://www.gantthead.com/article.cfm?ID=274152