Project Management ; Initial stage level

At the start of any project, there will be a variety of ideas and opinions about the purpose and scope of the project, what the final product of the project will be, and how the project will be carried out. The Project Initiation Stage is concerned with taking these ideas and intentions and developing them into a formal, planned, resourced and funded project. 
In order to define a project in this way, it is first necessary to clearly and explicitly define what the project is intended to achieve and what its scope of interest will be.

By defining this first, a benchmark is created for assessing the quality of what is actually produced at the end of the project. 
It is also necessary to develop a process by which the project objectives can be achieved. This process will typically involve carrying out a number of tasks and producing a number of products during the course of the project. The tasks produce the products. For clarity of purpose and for control reasons it is useful to arrange these tasks in a top down structure, which progressively specify the required work in more detail.

This is called a work breakdown structure. LBMS provides a series of standard work breakdown structures for strategic planning and applications development. However, it is important to look for opportunities to customize this for the particular circumstances of the project and its objectives. The work breakdown structure will provide a benchmark by which the quality of the project process can be assessed.

The Project Initiation Stage must also define what resources and associated time commitment are required to carry out the project. The work breakdown structure provides a basis from which this estimation can be carried out. The resource and time commitment can be used to calculate an end date for the project and an estimate of its cost. This information is key input into the establishment of a business case for the intended project.

The overall project schedule is not at a sufficient level of detail to enable the allocation of actual resources to tasks, or to control progress. It is necessary to produce a more detailed plan for these purposes. This detailed plan is only produced for the next stage of the project, usually covering an elapsed time of two to four months.

The way the project is managed and executed is the key to its success. The involvement of the right people for data capture and decision making is also crucial. It is necessary to identify and recruit these people at the start of the project and to define the project organization structure. It is also necessary to establish the procedures that will be used by the people in the Project Organization Structure to carry out and control the project work.

Finally, in order to establish a resourced and funded project, it is necessary to establish a clear and convincing business case for the project. This business case should be reviewed, and hopefully accepted by management. The business case will identify the projected benefits of meeting the objectives of the project, and balance these against the costs and risks associated with realizing these benefits. The business case can also be used as a benchmark to compare against actual results, costs and benefits in order to assess the ultimate success of the project.

The Project Initiation stage is described here as a sequence of steps. In reality, once the objective and scope have been defined, many of these steps occur in parallel, and the step products are developed iteratively, since there are many dependencies between the steps. It is necessary to plan the Project Initiation stage, albeit in an informal manner. Therefore it is important to create a Project Initiation Kick Off Plan scheduling the activities and resources.

Assignment:

Article Links for download:

Artikel untuk muat turun:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bw2w4u1p9ymi9te/AADRjinHBxT1CMBKtF_gCqa7a?dl=0

Note:

1. Assignments are all to be submitted in Bahasa Malaysia

2. Font: New Times Roman

3.Words: 800 - 1000 words

4. Spacing : 1.5

6. Submission date: week 6