Top 10 Project Management Terms

there can be so many project management terms and words and phrases it can definitely be overwhelming so i am here to teach you all the lingo here are my top 10 terms that project managers use stay tuned [Music] well hello youtube family welcome back to my channel i'm christina and this is cultivated chrissy now in today's video i'm going to be teaching you my top 10 pm terms now these are the terms that project managers use most often these terms if you know them it's going to help you to be more successful in your project delivery like i said it could be so overwhelming to know all these terms so i'm going to be teaching you the top 10 ones that you need to know so let's jump right into it so the first term is project life cycle now i already talked about this in my last two videos so you want to make sure you go ahead and watch that i will link them down below for you but this is a foundational one okay you need to understand this whether you're doing waterfall projects or agile projects right you want to understand the project life cycle and it basically helps you to understand how you go through the project from beginning to end right initiation to close so those five phases are initiate plan execute monitor and control and close and i will go through them in more detail in a second like i said you can do the project life cycle for both waterfall and agile projects for the waterfall project right you're essentially going through one big round of the project right of the project sequence um it's a very sequential right one phase after the next and then once you get to the close the project is completed now for agile right you're going through those five phases in multiple iterations right at the end of each iteration you have one piece of the larger project once you complete all of the different rounds right or sprints um then you'll have your completed project right your end product service or result that the project is supposed to have at its completion so that is the project life cycle let's go through each of the phases so the first phase of the project life cycle is to initiate right this helps you to know the who what when where why and how of your project right and you want to document that in a project charter in a stakeholder matrix right those are the two processes within the initiation phase and you want to make sure that you have that direction right that goal defined you don't just jump into a car start it and drive right you need to know where you're going um and so this helps you to define that so that you have that clear direction going into the next phases of the project so plan is the second phase in the project life cycle and keeping with that car analogy now you know where you're going right if you've initiated correctly you know where you're going you know what address you're trying to get to right you know the overall goal you go ahead and type that into the gps and your step-by-step directions pop up right this is the planning phase you need to kind of define how you're going to get there right and there are two tracks for this let's get into that so the two tracks that are involved within the planning of a project is one the more obvious one right you're going to plan out how you're going to deliver the end product service a result of your project right how are you going to achieve the overall goal of the project you define those steps right um but then the less obvious one is how you're going to actually conduct the project right what forms are you going to communicate um with how are you going to budget right what tools are you going to use how are you going to um and how are you going to mitigate the risks on your project all of that right so one track is the actual step by step on how you're going to deliver the project right and then the second track is actually how you're going to conduct the project all of that goes into the planning phase of the project so you want to make sure you do both during this phase so the next phase the third phase is to actually execute right so you have those step-by-step directions popped up and now it's time to follow them right um it's time to action that plan go through complete the activities on time within scope on budget right within the triple constraint we'll get to that later um but now it's just time to take action and follow the plan so monitor and control this is the fourth phase of the project the life cycle and to describe this i'll continue this card allergy all right say you're driving and you make a wrong turn right you go off track the gps reroutes right it finds the best route to get you back on track right another example is you're driving an accident happens right and your time increases on when you're going to get there right you're going to get there late right the gps reroutes it gives you some alternative routes right to help you get around the traffic um and hopefully still get there on time right so this is very similar to what you're doing in the monitoring control phase right things are going to happen on your projects risks may come to fruition right you may have issues pop-up staffing issues things like that pop up and you have to figure out how to stay on track right you're looking at your projects closely you're watching the activities making sure things are done on time and if they're not what's impacting that right it's really being a problem solver right being proactive staying on top of things staying on top of your team and being quick to come up with solutions should things take place right that's what monitoring control is all about and it's extremely important to do so right same thing when it comes to changes on the project if something has been decided that it's going to change you need to understand what are the impacts going to be of that change right we look at everything in terms of scope time and budget right your triple constraint and again i will get into that shortly but you want to make sure you know how things are going to impact um the project and so all of this is about keeping a close eye very important step so the next and final phase of the project life cycle is to close okay so keeping up with this analogy you driven and followed the step-by-step directions that your gps pulled up you may have gotten off track but you came back on track and you reached your destination but you want to make sure that you're in the right place right that you didn't drive all this way for nothing what you drove all this way for they're actually providing that right at this place it's meeting your needs right and it's going to be the same thing for your project you want to look at all of what you produced right compare that you know you and the final reviewer compare that against the acceptance criteria for each of the deliverables that was already defined right and you want to make sure that this is meeting the need right what was the overall goal and do we have that here in front of us right if you had any contracts open you want to look at each of the deliverables each of the metrics on the contract and make sure that those were actually delivered upon right and you want to close those things out you know make sure payment is done all of that stuff we're closing things out right true to the name if you uh need to put certain things into operations right meaning that it's going to be something that's used on a daily as a result of this project you want to make sure there's going to be a new owner for that right and it's called transference you want to make sure that you're transferring the deliverables of this project to a rightful owner to a new owner because you don't want that to be you right your work is going to be done after this and if you don't transfer things properly then people are going to keep coming to you so you want to make sure that you do that so again this is the project life cycle this is a foundational framework that you really need to know and truly understand and understanding this is definitely going to help you in your project delivery so that was the project life cycle let's get into the second term so the second term is stakeholders now i will probably already use this a million times right but here i'm going to actually define it your stakeholders are those people on your project that are indirectly and directly affected or impacted or involved in your project right and you want to make sure that you really are thoughtful in who these people are right not just the people again that are directly involved but those that are going to be indirectly involved right and impacted by this work um you also want to make sure that you're including your customer voice right or voc voice of customer right you want to make sure that you're doing that um for example i did a sickle cell project um you know a few years ago and we made sure that on the project we had patients that had sickle cell on the project right it was really important and foundational that we heard from them so make sure when you're picking your stakeholders that you're really thinking thoughtfully about who that is and including the customer so if you've ever heard of a racy right this can help you to also define who your stakeholders are this tells you who's responsible accountable consulted and informed on the project it doesn't include the voice of the customer so again make sure you do that but it can help you to start to think about who's involved in that now defining stakeholders is really really important when it comes to the people side of change right i talk about change management and that's really you looking at any changes that come up on a project but there's another change management as well and that is the people side of change right when you're delivering a project and you have a new product or service offering right there are staff members that are going to have to implement that right there are people that are going to have to change how they've been working right add to their roles all of that so people are going to also have to change as a result of what you're doing right so we want to make sure right that we're looking at that as well looking at how they're going to change and making sure we're speaking to them throughout the project about this making sure we tell them what's in it for them all of that right um so that's going to be key again you need to know who these people are put them on your stakeholder matrix because we're going to need to develop a communication plan to include them in as we implement this project so communication is the number one reason why projects fail okay so i'm stressing the people side of change because your customers also include your internal customers right which are your employees your staff members they are your internal customers um and so we want to make sure that that communication is tight and if you don't include them on the stakeholder matrix you're probably going to forget that they too need communication all right so let's jump into tip number three so let's jump into the third term and that is project charter now you're not going to want to skip this step right again you don't drive a car without direction okay this gives you the who what when where why and how of your project you document this and it's something that you can reference throughout the project but believe you me you do not want to skip this because if you do you're going to be in meetings and people like why are we doing this again why do we even need to do this what are we trying to accomplish and it's so it's extremely annoying and you're gonna have to go back and forth with people trying to remember what was the whole purpose of this why are we doing this it's better to just document it okay a great project charter will have all this information for them in a one quick two one to two pager um where you can have all of this information okay so please do not skip this step you will definitely regret it and make sure you guys go ahead and subscribe because in my next video i'll be talking all about the project charter i'm going in depth about each section what you're supposed to do to complete it all of that and i have a template that i've actually created as well that goes in depth on how to complete each section i have prompting questions that you can use when facilitating the a meeting to gather this information from leadership all of that okay so it gives you directions on how to complete it prompting questions that you can ask people to answer the questions and all of that is available in the template i will go ahead and link that for you guys below but don't skip this project charter okay it's gonna make your life harder don't make your life harder so the fourth term is deliverable okay again i briefly touched on this in a previous video but you're going to want to know the term deliverable right because this is telling you what are the outputs of this project right and you can have multiple deliverables or multiple outputs in your project that are all going to contribute to you being able to achieve the overall goal of the project right um and so you know i spoke about the sickle cell project so you know rolling on this again right in the sickle cell project we needed to develop a care plan for them right that physicians would use when speaking with the patient and then they can take that home and figure out how to action it if they're in pain right what steps should they be taking um so we needed to actually develop the questions for the care plan and then the action items for that we had to speak to the patients themselves we had to speak to the physicians understand best practices all of that so that's a deliverable in itself and then we needed to go ahead and integrate that care plan into the electronic health record right so that's another deliverable um all of this contributed to the overall goal of having a care plan developed for the sickle cell anemia patients right that physicians can go ahead and use and they can take home um so again multiple things within that all contributing to the overall goal of the project right so that is deliverables so the next term is wbs or work breakdown structure now this is a high level plan for your project right but it's not a full project schedule that has durations and responsibilities and time frames um and predecessors it doesn't have all of that in there right it mostly has the activities and i'll tell you which ones it can either be deliverable based like this care plan that i talked about or it could be a phase based um work breakdown structure like when you're constructing a house right um and so those are the two ways you can write it for me i mostly do deliverable based but it really is going to depend on the project itself what is best for the project and how best to illustrate how you're going to implement it now the work breakdown structure is really cool because in a tree map format it really shows you how everything rolls up to meet the overall goal of the project right it's a document that i love to use before the project schedule is fully completed right um and even after that i really like to use it i bring it to different meetings things like that the leadership doesn't need to see the whole project plan right that's really for you as a person that's managing the project um they don't need to see that at every meeting yes some of the meetings you want to bring some components of that but you don't need all of that this is a nice you know one to two page document that kind of rolls everything up in a really nice way visually um for people to be able to see and understand you know after you've collected all these requirements how things are piecing together to meet the overall vision of the project right um so it's a really useful document um and once you complete it you can take those activities how you've written it and i'll go through the levels in a second and just transfer them right over into a project schedule and then build out the rest of the components the responsibilities the durations time frames predecessors all of that um it'll make your life so much easier if you already have the work breakdown structure developed you can just transfer everything over now the wbs is traditionally developed in four levels okay so level one is the project right you can put the title of the project the goal of the project right i like to put that there as well but that's your level one and i'll put this on the screen as well level two are all your deliverables or all your phases okay so for the sickle cell project if it was deliverable based one is the development of that the actual care plan right i would put it on a word document and then another deliverable would be us integrating it into the ehr right or the electronic health record right if it is construction of a home um i live in florida i watch a lot of hgtv so if it was a phase based uh work breakdown structure right you could start with the excavation right and then once you're excavated you have to put your plumbing down and pour your foundation right and then once you do that you can build the walls then put your trusses on all of that right so it's sequential right one thing has to happen after the other um but it tells you the order of things right where the deliverables may not necessarily tell you the order of things but it tells you the key things that have to be um provided right your key outputs of the project so that's the the difference there now level three are going to be your work packages right or the different outputs that are going to be needed in order to deliver that particular deliverable right um and so for the excavation of the house right you have to actually do the digging right you have to order the machinery then you have to dig so you know you have to get the plans right that tell you where to dig all of that so those are going to be your different work packages um and then level four right going a lit even more deeper into it what activities do you have to do in order to be able to achieve that output right so for example if you need the plans right to tell you where you need to dig you need to get an architect right the architect needs to develop an architectural plan and then you need to see what his measurements are mark it on the ground and then the machinery is ordered and the machinery knows where to dig up the dirt right all of that are kind of the key activities that need to happen in order to produce that output i hope that makes sense but again i'll put it on the screen for you so that leads into our sixth term which is a project schedule okay um so you had your work breakdown structure right if you did that then you're easily able to transfer all of the activities using those same levels into a project schedule and now you need to add your durations right which tells you how long each task is going to take you can add the person responsible for completion of that any resources that you're going to need in terms of staffing or products that you need to purchase or contract out for all of that you put your time frames in there so this really gives you a comprehensive plan as to how you're going to complete the project and yes this is very waterfall not something that you're going to be able to do in an agile project right but project schedules you're going to have all of this defined at the front end now you want a tool that's going to help you to do this in a more automated and seamless way right there are plenty of tools out there i've used reich i've used the loxis i've used smartsheet there's so many tools out there so you want to make sure if you can right if your organization permits that you can you can use a tool that can kind of make this easier right microsoft project can also do this as well um yes you can do it in excel right but i find that excel project schedule are going to be either really complex or oversimplified to the point where that key functionality is not going to be there right and you can miss some things right um these automated tools can tell you you know when you you have late um tasks that need to be done right when people are overstaffed all of that it could really get into some things that are really helpful for you when monitoring and controlling your project right whereas excel may not be able to do that so seamlessly um so you know you have to use what is available to you um but i would try to use a more automated tool versus excel either way you need to make sure you know project schedule and how to build one um very important piece of the project so the next term and i mentioned this previously is triple constraint okay now this tells you what your project looks like in terms of scope time and resources right if a change happens on your project you need to understand how things are going to be affected right if you have a change in scope then you may have a change in time right if you have a change in time you may have a change in resources right something is going to impact the next right it is connected all right and i'll put this on the screen for you to see visually as well but one if you impact one it's going to impact something else something's got to give right um and so if a risk comes to fruition if a change happens you need to make sure that in terms of scope time and resources you can figure out what's going to be the impact and be able to communicate that to leadership make sure everyone's okay with that because then you're going to have to change something on the project right and when i say resources i mean personnel right staffing and i also mean the actual products right and that has a cost associated with it so scope time and budget or scope time and cost right people use different frames but that's essentially what that means so the eighth term is baseline now this is a really important term as well because essentially when you develop and finalize your project plan you want to take a snapshot of what the plan looks like right what are the dates who's responsible what tasks are in there because that may change throughout the project right if you don't have that initial snapshot and continue to take snapshots every time you change but if you don't have that initial snapshot you're not going to know where you started right if a change took place and it's going to add 5 days 10 days to the project plan you want to be able to see that difference in time right by knowing where you started and yes you may keep it in your head or you may forget after the fifth change right you may forget so you want to take snapshots right and you can re-baseline the project meaning you have one baseline from the original state right and then a project happens uh sorry a change happens and you go ahead update the plan right and then you re-baseline it meaning you take another screenshot and these are the new dates right um if you are doing this in excel you can go ahead and save as and you don't edit that version you put it in a folder you know a baselines folder so you can see different snapshots of where the project is if you're using one of those automated tools that i talked about that are great for project management then you'll be able to quickly navigate easily through the different baselines of the project right um so you know you want to make sure that you do this because you want to know where you intended right to be um and where you are you want to be able to see that difference all right and baselining helps you to do that so my next term is risks now again i keep saying things are important but these are my top ten right risks are important okay now this can definitely be taboo i find because when you're asking for people to define risks they either think you know is it that you think i'm not doing my job well right or certain leadership may not want to include risks right it's in the project charter technically right but they may not want to include it because if they're pitching the project they don't want leadership to know that there are risks all of that right but you want to make sure that you're driving home the point right that this is potentially what could happen right not what has happened these are things that could happen that can take your project off track and all we're trying to do is get ahead of that right and plan for that in the beginning so that if it happens right we don't know if it will but if it does we already have a plan in place right and it's not going to stop us from sticking to the original plan right so drive home the point that all this is is how we get ahead of things what could happen not what has happened okay so you do risk planning at the beginning of the project right prior to even writing the project schedule because once you have your mitigation plan in place for your risks right you can actually build that into your project schedule um ahead of time right but you want to do this planning prior to the project schedule development and sometimes it may happen even after that um once you identify your risks you want to evaluate them right and you're looking at in terms of evaluation you're looking at the impact or the severity of this risk right if it was to happen how bad would this be right you need to be able to um understand that and evaluate that right a lot of people like to use a scale i'll go ahead and pop one up on the screen for you as an example right um you can use you know a scale one two and three one being the lowest severity three being the highest right um and then you also wanna look at the likelihood that this will happen or the probability that this thing will take place right how likely is this to even take place right and if it does how severe will it be right it's a combination of those two things in order to evaluate it and once you evaluate it right you need to plan for how you're gonna handle this if it should come to fruition now there are four ways that you can handle a risk right you can just accept it right and you have your mitigation plan in place right accept it this is what if this happens we we already know what to do about it right you can completely avoid it right um try to stop it from even taking place you could also reduce it right reduce right lessen the blow if you will right that's something you can do and then you could also transfer it right which means you can get a contractor or someone else to deal with this problem should it happen right so there are four different ways you can handle that um and you want to do that all in your mitigation planning of your risk so document them right there's something called a risk register um where you can document the risk itself you have um the impact and severity or the probability or likelihood you have those scores you have a general score kind of putting those two things together right calculating those two things together and you can see how how high on this risk plan is is this risk how much should we pay attention to this thing who would be responsible for it should it happen right and then what's the mitigation plan right um so that's the risk register it's something that can help you to track these things because again this is going to be really important and again you want to make sure you do this at the front end so that if it happens you already know how to handle it so my tenth term right is project status reports again very important at any point during your project right as the project manager you need to know where your project is right what's been completed what risks are you facing right what issues are coming up um how how far into the project plan are we right are we having staffing issues are we having budget issues you need to know where your project is okay and your status reports can help you do that right help you to understand that and also help others to understand that right we talked about a communication plan and you want to use these documents to facilitate that communication plan now there are multiple types of reports that can support your project um you can do more quantitative reports that tell you the percent complete percent of tasks late percent of tasks you know that have been completed or implemented or in progress right the percent of tasks assigned to a certain person and how much they've completed right really quantitative reports right and depending on who your stakeholder is and how they like to see information that can be a report that is really helpful for them right um and then you can have more qualitative reports right something for example like a top two or a top three report that tells you what are your top two accomplishments for this week and what are the things that are upcoming for you right what are the things that you're working on um but you know more kind of information based word based versus numbers based numerical um so and then you can have dashboards right which is kind of a combination of both right dashboards can have some of these numerical snapshot pieces of information and then also kind of get more into the the details in a more qualitative way um so dashboards are great for that as well um again you want to communicate to people in the way that best fits their need and their communication style right we talked about that in a previous video so very important you want to make sure you know where your project is and you want to make sure that you're communicating that well throughout the project implementation so those are my top 10 tips comment below what are some of the terms that you guys are hearing most often right if you're in project management or you're in the field somehow project coordinator whatever the case may be what are some of those terms that you're hearing over and over again maybe we could do a part two okay like this video if you found it helpful make sure you go ahead and subscribe if you are looking to master the role of a pm i will be putting out videos each week and thank you again so much for watching see you in my next one [Music]

there can be so many project management terms and words and phrases it can definitely be overwhelming so i am here to teach you all the lingo here are my top 10 terms that project managers use stay tuned [Music] well hello youtube family welcome back to my channel i&#39;m christina and this is cultivated chrissy now in today&#39;s video i&#39;m going to be teaching you my top 10 pm terms now these are the terms that project managers use most often these terms if you know them it&#39;s going to help you to be more successful in your project delivery like i said it could be so overwhelming to know all these terms so i&#39;m going to be teaching you the top 10 ones that you need to know so let&#39;s jump right into it so the first term is project life cycle now i already talked about this in my last two videos so you want to make sure you go ahead and watch that i will link them down below for you but this is a foundational one okay you need to understand this whether you&#39;re doing waterfall projects or agile projects right you want to understand the project life cycle and it basically helps you to understand how you go through the project from beginning to end right initiation to close so those five phases are initiate plan execute monitor and control and close and i will go through them in more detail in a second like i said you can do the project life cycle for both waterfall and agile projects for the waterfall project right you&#39;re essentially going through one big round of the project right of the project sequence um it&#39;s a very sequential right one phase after the next and then once you get to the close the project is completed now for agile right you&#39;re going through those five phases in multiple iterations right at the end of each iteration you have one piece of the larger project once you complete all of the different rounds right or sprints um then you&#39;ll have your completed project right your end product service or result that the project is supposed to have at its completion so that is the project life cycle let&#39;s go through each of the phases so the first phase of the project life cycle is to initiate right this helps you to know the who what when where why and how of your project right and you want to document that in a project charter in a stakeholder matrix right those are the two processes within the initiation phase and you want to make sure that you have that direction right that goal defined you don&#39;t just jump into a car start it and drive right you need to know where you&#39;re going um and so this helps you to define that so that you have that clear direction going into the next phases of the project so plan is the second phase in the project life cycle and keeping with that car analogy now you know where you&#39;re going right if you&#39;ve initiated correctly you know where you&#39;re going you know what address you&#39;re trying to get to right you know the overall goal you go ahead and type that into the gps and your step-by-step directions pop up right this is the planning phase you need to kind of define how you&#39;re going to get there right and there are two tracks for this let&#39;s get into that so the two tracks that are involved within the planning of a project is one the more obvious one right you&#39;re going to plan out how you&#39;re going to deliver the end product service a result of your project right how are you going to achieve the overall goal of the project you define those steps right um but then the less obvious one is how you&#39;re going to actually conduct the project right what forms are you going to communicate um with how are you going to budget right what tools are you going to use how are you going to um and how are you going to mitigate the risks on your project all of that right so one track is the actual step by step on how you&#39;re going to deliver the project right and then the second track is actually how you&#39;re going to conduct the project all of that goes into the planning phase of the project so you want to make sure you do both during this phase so the next phase the third phase is to actually execute right so you have those step-by-step directions popped up and now it&#39;s time to follow them right um it&#39;s time to action that plan go through complete the activities on time within scope on budget right within the triple constraint we&#39;ll get to that later um but now it&#39;s just time to take action and follow the plan so monitor and control this is the fourth phase of the project the life cycle and to describe this i&#39;ll continue this card allergy all right say you&#39;re driving and you make a wrong turn right you go off track the gps reroutes right it finds the best route to get you back on track right another example is you&#39;re driving an accident happens right and your time increases on when you&#39;re going to get there right you&#39;re going to get there late right the gps reroutes it gives you some alternative routes right to help you get around the traffic um and hopefully still get there on time right so this is very similar to what you&#39;re doing in the monitoring control phase right things are going to happen on your projects risks may come to fruition right you may have issues pop-up staffing issues things like that pop up and you have to figure out how to stay on track right you&#39;re looking at your projects closely you&#39;re watching the activities making sure things are done on time and if they&#39;re not what&#39;s impacting that right it&#39;s really being a problem solver right being proactive staying on top of things staying on top of your team and being quick to come up with solutions should things take place right that&#39;s what monitoring control is all about and it&#39;s extremely important to do so right same thing when it comes to changes on the project if something has been decided that it&#39;s going to change you need to understand what are the impacts going to be of that change right we look at everything in terms of scope time and budget right your triple constraint and again i will get into that shortly but you want to make sure you know how things are going to impact um the project and so all of this is about keeping a close eye very important step so the next and final phase of the project life cycle is to close okay so keeping up with this analogy you driven and followed the step-by-step directions that your gps pulled up you may have gotten off track but you came back on track and you reached your destination but you want to make sure that you&#39;re in the right place right that you didn&#39;t drive all this way for nothing what you drove all this way for they&#39;re actually providing that right at this place it&#39;s meeting your needs right and it&#39;s going to be the same thing for your project you want to look at all of what you produced right compare that you know you and the final reviewer compare that against the acceptance criteria for each of the deliverables that was already defined right and you want to make sure that this is meeting the need right what was the overall goal and do we have that here in front of us right if you had any contracts open you want to look at each of the deliverables each of the metrics on the contract and make sure that those were actually delivered upon right and you want to close those things out you know make sure payment is done all of that stuff we&#39;re closing things out right true to the name if you uh need to put certain things into operations right meaning that it&#39;s going to be something that&#39;s used on a daily as a result of this project you want to make sure there&#39;s going to be a new owner for that right and it&#39;s called transference you want to make sure that you&#39;re transferring the deliverables of this project to a rightful owner to a new owner because you don&#39;t want that to be you right your work is going to be done after this and if you don&#39;t transfer things properly then people are going to keep coming to you so you want to make sure that you do that so again this is the project life cycle this is a foundational framework that you really need to know and truly understand and understanding this is definitely going to help you in your project delivery so that was the project life cycle let&#39;s get into the second term so the second term is stakeholders now i will probably already use this a million times right but here i&#39;m going to actually define it your stakeholders are those people on your project that are indirectly and directly affected or impacted or involved in your project right and you want to make sure that you really are thoughtful in who these people are right not just the people again that are directly involved but those that are going to be indirectly involved right and impacted by this work um you also want to make sure that you&#39;re including your customer voice right or voc voice of customer right you want to make sure that you&#39;re doing that um for example i did a sickle cell project um you know a few years ago and we made sure that on the project we had patients that had sickle cell on the project right it was really important and foundational that we heard from them so make sure when you&#39;re picking your stakeholders that you&#39;re really thinking thoughtfully about who that is and including the customer so if you&#39;ve ever heard of a racy right this can help you to also define who your stakeholders are this tells you who&#39;s responsible accountable consulted and informed on the project it doesn&#39;t include the voice of the customer so again make sure you do that but it can help you to start to think about who&#39;s involved in that now defining stakeholders is really really important when it comes to the people side of change right i talk about change management and that&#39;s really you looking at any changes that come up on a project but there&#39;s another change management as well and that is the people side of change right when you&#39;re delivering a project and you have a new product or service offering right there are staff members that are going to have to implement that right there are people that are going to have to change how they&#39;ve been working right add to their roles all of that so people are going to also have to change as a result of what you&#39;re doing right so we want to make sure right that we&#39;re looking at that as well looking at how they&#39;re going to change and making sure we&#39;re speaking to them throughout the project about this making sure we tell them what&#39;s in it for them all of that right um so that&#39;s going to be key again you need to know who these people are put them on your stakeholder matrix because we&#39;re going to need to develop a communication plan to include them in as we implement this project so communication is the number one reason why projects fail okay so i&#39;m stressing the people side of change because your customers also include your internal customers right which are your employees your staff members they are your internal customers um and so we want to make sure that that communication is tight and if you don&#39;t include them on the stakeholder matrix you&#39;re probably going to forget that they too need communication all right so let&#39;s jump into tip number three so let&#39;s jump into the third term and that is project charter now you&#39;re not going to want to skip this step right again you don&#39;t drive a car without direction okay this gives you the who what when where why and how of your project you document this and it&#39;s something that you can reference throughout the project but believe you me you do not want to skip this because if you do you&#39;re going to be in meetings and people like why are we doing this again why do we even need to do this what are we trying to accomplish and it&#39;s so it&#39;s extremely annoying and you&#39;re gonna have to go back and forth with people trying to remember what was the whole purpose of this why are we doing this it&#39;s better to just document it okay a great project charter will have all this information for them in a one quick two one to two pager um where you can have all of this information okay so please do not skip this step you will definitely regret it and make sure you guys go ahead and subscribe because in my next video i&#39;ll be talking all about the project charter i&#39;m going in depth about each section what you&#39;re supposed to do to complete it all of that and i have a template that i&#39;ve actually created as well that goes in depth on how to complete each section i have prompting questions that you can use when facilitating the a meeting to gather this information from leadership all of that okay so it gives you directions on how to complete it prompting questions that you can ask people to answer the questions and all of that is available in the template i will go ahead and link that for you guys below but don&#39;t skip this project charter okay it&#39;s gonna make your life harder don&#39;t make your life harder so the fourth term is deliverable okay again i briefly touched on this in a previous video but you&#39;re going to want to know the term deliverable right because this is telling you what are the outputs of this project right and you can have multiple deliverables or multiple outputs in your project that are all going to contribute to you being able to achieve the overall goal of the project right um and so you know i spoke about the sickle cell project so you know rolling on this again right in the sickle cell project we needed to develop a care plan for them right that physicians would use when speaking with the patient and then they can take that home and figure out how to action it if they&#39;re in pain right what steps should they be taking um so we needed to actually develop the questions for the care plan and then the action items for that we had to speak to the patients themselves we had to speak to the physicians understand best practices all of that so that&#39;s a deliverable in itself and then we needed to go ahead and integrate that care plan into the electronic health record right so that&#39;s another deliverable um all of this contributed to the overall goal of having a care plan developed for the sickle cell anemia patients right that physicians can go ahead and use and they can take home um so again multiple things within that all contributing to the overall goal of the project right so that is deliverables so the next term is wbs or work breakdown structure now this is a high level plan for your project right but it&#39;s not a full project schedule that has durations and responsibilities and time frames um and predecessors it doesn&#39;t have all of that in there right it mostly has the activities and i&#39;ll tell you which ones it can either be deliverable based like this care plan that i talked about or it could be a phase based um work breakdown structure like when you&#39;re constructing a house right um and so those are the two ways you can write it for me i mostly do deliverable based but it really is going to depend on the project itself what is best for the project and how best to illustrate how you&#39;re going to implement it now the work breakdown structure is really cool because in a tree map format it really shows you how everything rolls up to meet the overall goal of the project right it&#39;s a document that i love to use before the project schedule is fully completed right um and even after that i really like to use it i bring it to different meetings things like that the leadership doesn&#39;t need to see the whole project plan right that&#39;s really for you as a person that&#39;s managing the project um they don&#39;t need to see that at every meeting yes some of the meetings you want to bring some components of that but you don&#39;t need all of that this is a nice you know one to two page document that kind of rolls everything up in a really nice way visually um for people to be able to see and understand you know after you&#39;ve collected all these requirements how things are piecing together to meet the overall vision of the project right um so it&#39;s a really useful document um and once you complete it you can take those activities how you&#39;ve written it and i&#39;ll go through the levels in a second and just transfer them right over into a project schedule and then build out the rest of the components the responsibilities the durations time frames predecessors all of that um it&#39;ll make your life so much easier if you already have the work breakdown structure developed you can just transfer everything over now the wbs is traditionally developed in four levels okay so level one is the project right you can put the title of the project the goal of the project right i like to put that there as well but that&#39;s your level one and i&#39;ll put this on the screen as well level two are all your deliverables or all your phases okay so for the sickle cell project if it was deliverable based one is the development of that the actual care plan right i would put it on a word document and then another deliverable would be us integrating it into the ehr right or the electronic health record right if it is construction of a home um i live in florida i watch a lot of hgtv so if it was a phase based uh work breakdown structure right you could start with the excavation right and then once you&#39;re excavated you have to put your plumbing down and pour your foundation right and then once you do that you can build the walls then put your trusses on all of that right so it&#39;s sequential right one thing has to happen after the other um but it tells you the order of things right where the deliverables may not necessarily tell you the order of things but it tells you the key things that have to be um provided right your key outputs of the project so that&#39;s the the difference there now level three are going to be your work packages right or the different outputs that are going to be needed in order to deliver that particular deliverable right um and so for the excavation of the house right you have to actually do the digging right you have to order the machinery then you have to dig so you know you have to get the plans right that tell you where to dig all of that so those are going to be your different work packages um and then level four right going a lit even more deeper into it what activities do you have to do in order to be able to achieve that output right so for example if you need the plans right to tell you where you need to dig you need to get an architect right the architect needs to develop an architectural plan and then you need to see what his measurements are mark it on the ground and then the machinery is ordered and the machinery knows where to dig up the dirt right all of that are kind of the key activities that need to happen in order to produce that output i hope that makes sense but again i&#39;ll put it on the screen for you so that leads into our sixth term which is a project schedule okay um so you had your work breakdown structure right if you did that then you&#39;re easily able to transfer all of the activities using those same levels into a project schedule and now you need to add your durations right which tells you how long each task is going to take you can add the person responsible for completion of that any resources that you&#39;re going to need in terms of staffing or products that you need to purchase or contract out for all of that you put your time frames in there so this really gives you a comprehensive plan as to how you&#39;re going to complete the project and yes this is very waterfall not something that you&#39;re going to be able to do in an agile project right but project schedules you&#39;re going to have all of this defined at the front end now you want a tool that&#39;s going to help you to do this in a more automated and seamless way right there are plenty of tools out there i&#39;ve used reich i&#39;ve used the loxis i&#39;ve used smartsheet there&#39;s so many tools out there so you want to make sure if you can right if your organization permits that you can you can use a tool that can kind of make this easier right microsoft project can also do this as well um yes you can do it in excel right but i find that excel project schedule are going to be either really complex or oversimplified to the point where that key functionality is not going to be there right and you can miss some things right um these automated tools can tell you you know when you you have late um tasks that need to be done right when people are overstaffed all of that it could really get into some things that are really helpful for you when monitoring and controlling your project right whereas excel may not be able to do that so seamlessly um so you know you have to use what is available to you um but i would try to use a more automated tool versus excel either way you need to make sure you know project schedule and how to build one um very important piece of the project so the next term and i mentioned this previously is triple constraint okay now this tells you what your project looks like in terms of scope time and resources right if a change happens on your project you need to understand how things are going to be affected right if you have a change in scope then you may have a change in time right if you have a change in time you may have a change in resources right something is going to impact the next right it is connected all right and i&#39;ll put this on the screen for you to see visually as well but one if you impact one it&#39;s going to impact something else something&#39;s got to give right um and so if a risk comes to fruition if a change happens you need to make sure that in terms of scope time and resources you can figure out what&#39;s going to be the impact and be able to communicate that to leadership make sure everyone&#39;s okay with that because then you&#39;re going to have to change something on the project right and when i say resources i mean personnel right staffing and i also mean the actual products right and that has a cost associated with it so scope time and budget or scope time and cost right people use different frames but that&#39;s essentially what that means so the eighth term is baseline now this is a really important term as well because essentially when you develop and finalize your project plan you want to take a snapshot of what the plan looks like right what are the dates who&#39;s responsible what tasks are in there because that may change throughout the project right if you don&#39;t have that initial snapshot and continue to take snapshots every time you change but if you don&#39;t have that initial snapshot you&#39;re not going to know where you started right if a change took place and it&#39;s going to add 5 days 10 days to the project plan you want to be able to see that difference in time right by knowing where you started and yes you may keep it in your head or you may forget after the fifth change right you may forget so you want to take snapshots right and you can re-baseline the project meaning you have one baseline from the original state right and then a project happens uh sorry a change happens and you go ahead update the plan right and then you re-baseline it meaning you take another screenshot and these are the new dates right um if you are doing this in excel you can go ahead and save as and you don&#39;t edit that version you put it in a folder you know a baselines folder so you can see different snapshots of where the project is if you&#39;re using one of those automated tools that i talked about that are great for project management then you&#39;ll be able to quickly navigate easily through the different baselines of the project right um so you know you want to make sure that you do this because you want to know where you intended right to be um and where you are you want to be able to see that difference all right and baselining helps you to do that so my next term is risks now again i keep saying things are important but these are my top ten right risks are important okay now this can definitely be taboo i find because when you&#39;re asking for people to define risks they either think you know is it that you think i&#39;m not doing my job well right or certain leadership may not want to include risks right it&#39;s in the project charter technically right but they may not want to include it because if they&#39;re pitching the project they don&#39;t want leadership to know that there are risks all of that right but you want to make sure that you&#39;re driving home the point right that this is potentially what could happen right not what has happened these are things that could happen that can take your project off track and all we&#39;re trying to do is get ahead of that right and plan for that in the beginning so that if it happens right we don&#39;t know if it will but if it does we already have a plan in place right and it&#39;s not going to stop us from sticking to the original plan right so drive home the point that all this is is how we get ahead of things what could happen not what has happened okay so you do risk planning at the beginning of the project right prior to even writing the project schedule because once you have your mitigation plan in place for your risks right you can actually build that into your project schedule um ahead of time right but you want to do this planning prior to the project schedule development and sometimes it may happen even after that um once you identify your risks you want to evaluate them right and you&#39;re looking at in terms of evaluation you&#39;re looking at the impact or the severity of this risk right if it was to happen how bad would this be right you need to be able to um understand that and evaluate that right a lot of people like to use a scale i&#39;ll go ahead and pop one up on the screen for you as an example right um you can use you know a scale one two and three one being the lowest severity three being the highest right um and then you also wanna look at the likelihood that this will happen or the probability that this thing will take place right how likely is this to even take place right and if it does how severe will it be right it&#39;s a combination of those two things in order to evaluate it and once you evaluate it right you need to plan for how you&#39;re gonna handle this if it should come to fruition now there are four ways that you can handle a risk right you can just accept it right and you have your mitigation plan in place right accept it this is what if this happens we we already know what to do about it right you can completely avoid it right um try to stop it from even taking place you could also reduce it right reduce right lessen the blow if you will right that&#39;s something you can do and then you could also transfer it right which means you can get a contractor or someone else to deal with this problem should it happen right so there are four different ways you can handle that um and you want to do that all in your mitigation planning of your risk so document them right there&#39;s something called a risk register um where you can document the risk itself you have um the impact and severity or the probability or likelihood you have those scores you have a general score kind of putting those two things together right calculating those two things together and you can see how how high on this risk plan is is this risk how much should we pay attention to this thing who would be responsible for it should it happen right and then what&#39;s the mitigation plan right um so that&#39;s the risk register it&#39;s something that can help you to track these things because again this is going to be really important and again you want to make sure you do this at the front end so that if it happens you already know how to handle it so my tenth term right is project status reports again very important at any point during your project right as the project manager you need to know where your project is right what&#39;s been completed what risks are you facing right what issues are coming up um how how far into the project plan are we right are we having staffing issues are we having budget issues you need to know where your project is okay and your status reports can help you do that right help you to understand that and also help others to understand that right we talked about a communication plan and you want to use these documents to facilitate that communication plan now there are multiple types of reports that can support your project um you can do more quantitative reports that tell you the percent complete percent of tasks late percent of tasks you know that have been completed or implemented or in progress right the percent of tasks assigned to a certain person and how much they&#39;ve completed right really quantitative reports right and depending on who your stakeholder is and how they like to see information that can be a report that is really helpful for them right um and then you can have more qualitative reports right something for example like a top two or a top three report that tells you what are your top two accomplishments for this week and what are the things that are upcoming for you right what are the things that you&#39;re working on um but you know more kind of information based word based versus numbers based numerical um so and then you can have dashboards right which is kind of a combination of both right dashboards can have some of these numerical snapshot pieces of information and then also kind of get more into the the details in a more qualitative way um so dashboards are great for that as well um again you want to communicate to people in the way that best fits their need and their communication style right we talked about that in a previous video so very important you want to make sure you know where your project is and you want to make sure that you&#39;re communicating that well throughout the project implementation so those are my top 10 tips comment below what are some of the terms that you guys are hearing most often right if you&#39;re in project management or you&#39;re in the field somehow project coordinator whatever the case may be what are some of those terms that you&#39;re hearing over and over again maybe we could do a part two okay like this video if you found it helpful make sure you go ahead and subscribe if you are looking to master the role of a pm i will be putting out videos each week and thank you again so much for watching see you in my next one 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Transcript for:Top 10 Project Management Terms

Transcript for:
Top 10 Project Management Terms