Document Stakeholders, Risks, Assumptions, Constraints, Approval, Closure Requirements & Signoff's?

1. Course Introduction: Are you writing a project charter and are finding it difficult to document the stakeholder list? Project risks and assumptions. Do you need specific guidance on what should and should not be included in your project approval. Include your requirements. Do you want to understand what the sponsor needs during the project sign off stage. If your answer is yes to these questions, you have come to the right, please. As a project manager, you will always document and create a project charter as the first step of any project. A typical project charter includes all these components. In this course, you will learn these components of a project charter, stakeholder list, project risks and assumptions, project approval, enclosure requirements, and project sponsors and their sign offs. Documenting your stakeholder list includes appropriate identification of stakeholders, project risks and assumptions. Have a word, any potential issues that the project may face. Project approval enclosure requirements are basically those actions that must be completed before the sponsors signs off and fully approves the project. These components of your project charter are read by the sponsor and project of LOINC committee. And based on what you have documented, they will either approve or reject your project. Now, I have seen several projects being rejected because either the stakeholders were not identified accurately, risks and assumptions were not forecasted as they should have been. Or approval enclosure requirements were not met. These components of the project charter were documented by some of the seasoned project managers. Yet, the field, the reason for their failure is simple. There project stakeholder list, the risks and assumptions and project approval and closure requirements were not thought through. They were incomplete. The project managers did not pay much attention explaining and convincing their approvers that their project was critical. As a result, their documentation failed to impress. If you want your project charters to look comprehensive. If you want your project stakeholder list, risks and assumptions and project approval enclosure requirements to provide a complete picture. If you want these components to trigger an immediate action from the senior management to approve your project, funded and promoted. You must do this course. I have executed several 100 projects in the industry, and each of my project charters were instantly approved, funded, and promoted by the senior management. And I'm happy to share my knowledge and expertise to you by virtue of the streaming with that background information of what you will learn in this course and why it is important. We will start our learning journey. 2. Document Stakeholder List: Stakeholder list. Stakeholders are vital constitutes of your project's success or failure. Stakeholders are those who will get impacted by your project. You must include the names of all those who fit this category. Stakeholders also include those who impact your project. You must include their names to. Identification of stakeholders is an ongoing process. You will continue to update the stakeholder list as the project progresses. At this point in creating the project charter, you must update all the known stakeholders to date. 3. Document Project Risks: Project risks. Project risks, if not handled well, can throw your project of the course. In this lecture, you will learn what our project risks and how to identify and document them in your project charter. Let's begin. What are project risks? Project brings about the necessary change in any business process. When any change gets introduced, it brings with it several risks. These risks are potential situations that may occur in your business process. There are two major types of project risks. Positive risk and negative risk. Positive risks are enhancers. They bring about the necessary improvement and enrichment in the outcome of your project. These are value enablers. For example, your project team might create a byproduct that may result in huge revenue and profits for the business process. Negative risks are potential failure modes. They may cause your process to break down or could throw your project off completely. There are more chances that your project may come across negative risks, and hence, you must be prepared to tackle them as they arrive. No two projects may have the same risks. If you are not aware of your project risks, you may allow them to occur and impact your project. Identification of risks is vital. How to identify your project risks? You can identify project risks in several ways. One of the ways is to observe the process map of your business process. Process map is nothing but a flow chart that depicts each step of your business. You can conduct a brainstorming session with the subject matter experts, stakeholders, and your project team to review each step in the process, map, and identify the potential risks. Another way to identify project risks is to observe processes in the same or similar industries. You will get invaluable insights as you studies similar processes. Identification of project risks can also be executed using tools such as brainstorming, interviews, surveys, focus groups, among others. You can use these tools to gather inputs from your project team, subject matter experts, stakeholders, customers, etc. 4. Articulate Project Assumptions: Project assumptions. What our project assumptions? The project charter is created at the beginning of the project. You will not identify all the project requirements at this stage, nor would you have collated enough data. Basically, you will not have all the necessary knowledge and information you really need. In this situation, you can make certain assumptions and proceed with the project. As you move through the project journey and gain more insights and clarity, you can alter these assumptions. For example, at the beginning of the project, you may not know the vendors labor rate. In this situation, you may assume the amount of this labor rate based on a fair understanding of the market. Once the procurement team raises a request for proposal, you may ask them to include this question on the labor rate in the proposal form. Until then, you can use the assumed labor rate to calculate the project's overall budget. And you can also add a writer indicating that the sponsor may expect some variation in the final budget figures because of this assumption. Why is it necessary to document assumptions in the project charter? When you assume something in a project, you must make an effort to confirm it. In most situations and individual or a group of project team members may assume something and the reality may be totally different. Hence, it is necessary to have these assumptions documented and circulated to all stakeholders. If they have a difference of opinion, they can voice it now and mitigate any potential challenge in the future. For example, let's say you assume the labor rate to be $100 per hour and factored the amount in the budget. When the finance team sees this labor rate in the project charter, they may advise a 15% tax to be added to this rate, increasing the assumed cost $215 per hour. This will be a big difference if the project plans to hire the vendor labor for hundreds of hours. If the project manager fails to write this assumption in a project charter, he or she may have missed the gap of $15. That would have been a colossal mistake. 5. Write Project Constraints: Project constraints. Every organization has limited time, money, and resources. Each organization operates under some constraints. This situation also applies to your project. Your project may be pressed under some constraints. In this section, you must identify those constraints and document them. Remember, you are still in the initial phase of your project journey. It is okay to document the project constraints at a high level. Typically, project constraints can fall into any of the following categories. Scope, schedule, budget, quality, resources, risk, and contractual related. Depending upon your project, there may be other constraints to how would you identify the constraints. Meeting with the project sponsor. Project sponsor is one of the most significant sources of this information. Our project sponsor in most situations exactly knows the constraints that your project may have a discussion with the project team and stakeholders. Project team members and stakeholders may add a few unknown variables that may be constraints for your project. 6. Determine Project Approval Requirements: Project approval requirements, project approval requirements, or those requirements that need to be fulfilled before the sponsor signs of the project. It outlines the conditions to be met for approving the project. This section, the project approval requirements, also articulates the individuals who have the authority to sign off the project. Documenting these well in advance in the project charter has a few key benefits. It sets the expectations with the key stakeholders that they will review and approve the project after the necessary criteria are met. It involves the approving authorities in the project activities and its progress. It also creates the necessary buy-in from the stakeholders. 7. Identify Project Closure Requirements: Project closure requirements. The project approval requirements discuss the conditions which must be fulfilled to fully approve the project. This section, the project login requirements, articulates the requirements that are to be met to close or terminate the project or its phase. There are three scenarios involved here. The project or a phase is successful. The project or phase fails, or the project or phase needs to be scrapped. 8. Sponsors and Signoffs: Project sponsors and their sign offs. Once you have completed the project charter, you are required to set up a review meeting. The review meeting is presided by the project sponsor. You would be the facilitator of the meeting and the invited parties will include the project team members and the stakeholders. You would have the project charter and the supplemental documents ready for the sponsor to review. You would also need to have the right parties invited to the project review meeting to answer in any potential questions or address any concerns that the sponsor may have. Once the meeting is over, the sponsor would either reject the project or keep the project on hold, asking for more revisions or sign of the project. Rejecting the project may happen, but it is rare. Keeping the project on hold. Asking for more revisions would mean some critical aspect of the project is missed to be included. The sponsor may also ask to send a revised project charter for approval or hold another review meeting. Sign off the project is giving a sponsor stamp of approval for the project. It means that your project is now official and you can move to the detailed planning stage. 9. Mini Project: Mini-project. Now that you are fully aware of all the steps needed to document the stakeholder list. Project risks, assumptions and constraints, project approval and Clojure requirements and projects sine ofs. Here's a mini-project that can turn your learnings to reality. First, based on your learnings from the scores, make a list of the do's and don'ts of documenting the stakeholder list. Project risks, project assumptions, constraints, approval, include your requirements. Once your list is ready, document these components. If you are already working on a project, this activity can be executed for that project. Or if you don't have a project, you may think of a fictitious scenario and practice your newly learned skills. 10. Course Conclusion: Course conclusion. So we have come to the end of this course. Let's recap your learnings. You began this course journey by understanding how to document the stakeholder list. You will learn how to write the project risks. You then learned how to write the assumptions and constraints of your project. Further, you learned how to document the project approval and closure requirements. By the end of this course, you learned what goes into seeking project sponsors sign offs. That was your overall course journey. We have come to the end of this course. Please do share your review and I will see you in the next course.