Executive's Guide to Project Management: Organizational Processes and Practices for Supporting Complex Projects

A Step-by-Step Plan

We can now put the pieces of a plan together. Based on what we have done so far our plan to establish a PSO might look something like Figure 11.1.

Figure 11.1 A Plan to Establish a PSO

Establishing a PSO is an agile project and all agile projects begin with a Project Overview Statement (POS). The POS is a one-page document that provides a high-level description of the PSO development project written for anyone in the organization who has a reason to know what you are proposing to do. It answers these five questions:

• What problem or opportunity is being addressed by this project?
• What is the goal of the project?
• What are the objectives of the project?
• What are the success criteria?
• What are the major obstacles, risks, and assumptions?

The POS also serves as a gating factor for the senior management team (SMT) because it describes the project at a level of detail sufficient for them to make a go/no go decision on committing the resources to do the detail planning. Let's take a brief look at each part of the POS:

• Problem/opportunity. This statement describes a business condition that needs no defense or further clarification. Anyone who reads it will understand it and agree with it. The importance of this statement will determine whether or not the reader will continue to the goal statement or not. If the situation is grave enough, their continued reading is ...