Exploring the Management Areas
Discover key aspects of program and project management to increase your understanding of TPM.
We'll cover the following...
Previously, we introduced the key management areas: plan, risk, and stakeholder management. Using the Mercury program as an example, we’ll examine each of these in a bit more depth and continue to build upon our use case study.
Project plan
Let’s examine the Windows rollout project plan in a bit more detail. At this point in the course, we’ll assume a few things:
We have as much resourcing as we need (so, everything that can technically start at the beginning of the project will be scheduled to start).
No resource timing constraints exist.
Estimates are uniform across all platforms.
All predecessors are considered finish-to-start (meaning the predecessor must be finished before the task can start).
There are no inter-project dependencies.
In other words, a textbook program example!
Given these assumptions, the below table lists a simplified project plan for the Windows project:
A simplified view of the Windows project plan
ID | Milestone | Predecessor | Effort (weeks) |
1 | P2P subsystem ready |
| 8 |
2 | User interface ready | 1 | 16 |
3 | End-to-End (E2E) | 2 | 4 |
In the above example, there are a few simple dependencies shown: the user interface milestone requires that the subsystem is completed, and testing requires both preceding milestones to be complete. Now, this is extremely simplified and some seasoned TPMs may be screaming right now at this optimistic project timeline. As we explore each management area in greater detail, the project and program timelines ...