Chapter 4 Five Key Documents to Manage Expectation and Define Success
1. To ensure a success of a project, PM should pay great attention on those critical factors including agreement on goals, a plan, good communication, scope control, and management support. To achieve this, written documents are essential tool to pull everyone on the same page. In project management, there are five key documents that will help to address these critical factors successfully. They are the Project Charter, Statement of Work, Responsibility Matrix, Communication Plan, and Project Proposal.
2. The Charter serves as an announcement for kicking off the project. It should address the name and purpose of the project, the project manager’s name, and a statement on required support. It should be empowered by both expert and legitimate authority, and get signed by high authority such as project sponsor. It will take the formal recognition on authority and give a definition document for the project.
3. The Statement of Work is a document that describes and defines the goals, constrains, and success criteria for the project. It works as a contract for manage expectation and establish agreements. It can go with both internal and external customers to clarify the responsibilities and actions in a relationship. A good Statement of Work should include following important contents:
(a) In the Statement of work, it first needs to clearly describe the purpose of the statement.
(b) Then it should address the project scope and specify all the works required to meet the project objectives. Especially it should clearly define the boundary of the project and get everyone agreed on what is beyond the scope of the project.
(c) It should specify the final deliverable for this project. Detailed description about the final product should be clearly addressed. This will help to define the boundaries of the project and focuses the team’s efforts on producing the expected outcomes.
(d) The statement should provide good estimation on both cost and project schedule.
(e) The statement of work needs to set the objectives and make the objective be specific and measurable.
(f) The statement should list all the major stakeholders in this project.
(g) The statement must define the report chain so as to have a clear picture on who is report to whom and who is responsible for what.
Project manager should write the statement of work first and present it to all stakeholders, and then deal with the changes later based on updated information and agreement.
4. Document for responsibility matrix serves as a responsibility assignment for everyone involved in this project. It should lay out all the major activities in the project and the key stakeholder groups. Special code can be defined to classify the level of involvement, authority role, and responsibility of each stakeholder. Finally, the project manager should incorporate the responsibility matrix into the project rules. Once it is approved, all the stakeholders will have to follow the responsibility matrix accordingly through the project.
5. To ensure the success of the project, we need to create a communication plan for the project. A communication plan is the written strategy for getting the right information to the right people at the right time. All the stakeholders defined in the statement or work and responsibility matrix are the audience for most project communication. The information will be managed in different categories for authorizations, status changes and project coordination. The regularly scheduled progress meetings should be included into the communication plan.
6. Finally the project proposal is the document to launch the project. It is usually written before the statement of work and is used to assemble the information necessary for a sponsor or project selection board. Similar to the SOW, the purpose of the proposal is to move the project from an inspiration to a tangible, achievable goal. The contents of the project proposal may overlap with that in the statement of work. It should include project goal, problem/opportunity definition, proposed solution, project selection and its benefits, cost-benefit analysis, core business requirement on this project, project scope, obstacles and risk, and a schedule overview.
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