Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Laying Out Project Processes

As you manage a project, some activities keep running for as long as the project does. For example, you have to keep an eye on changes that people ask for and run them through a change-management process to prevent scope creep. A change-management process includes steps for requesting changes, deciding whether to include changes in the project, and tracking the changes. Similarly, risk-management, communication, and quality-management processes also run until the project is complete. Defining these processes has to occur while you’re still planning the project, or your team will mill about like sheep without a border collie. This section introduces the four processes you define and document in the project plan.

Tip

How you approach change management, risk management, and other processes depends on your project. Small projects can survive with relatively informal procedures, whereas large, global projects require more rigor. Moreover, corporate culture has an effect on how team members view the processes you define.

Communicating

As a project manager, you already know that most of your job is communicating with people. But everyone else working on a project communicates, too. A communication plan describes the rules for sharing information on a project, like whether people should email status updates, post them on a website, or scratch them into banana leaves. Chapters Chapter 19, Chapter 20, and online-only Chapter 25 (available from this book’s Missing ...