Session 01: Kick-off
Hey there and welcome to the inaugural session for the PM Standards project to gather and present Cryptiquest’s project management standards. This session will suss out the project goal and objectives.
Initial Research
History
This project was sparked during the Retrospective of the Online Notes (Phase I) project which was the first Cryptiquest project that officially kept notes. There were several issues with that project that revealed a guide of best practices could have helped to mitigate the problems.
This has become even more apparent as subsequent projects revealed more and more lessons that would apply to the process of project creation. And as new practices were implemented, errors and double work started to drop; showcasing that following best practices was working.
Need
As of now, there is no official documentation for these best practices but they are sprinkled throughout the various retrospectives that have been published since the initiation of this site.
Need: To create an official repository for project management best practices
Ideal Situation
In an ideal situation, the result would be a workable template for project generation. One where a creator could think of a project and use the template to guide them to launch while mitigating pitfalls.
Limitations and Unknowns
- While the best practices have been documented throughout the various retrospectives, I don’t know what they exactly contain at the moment and research will be needed. (This has been done and they mostly contain new phase suggestions and terminology to help mitigate pitfalls.)
- Target audience at this point is just me. In the future, a guide creation tool will be generated and these standards will need to be transformed into a guide for public consumption; however, the version of the guide created in this project can still be made public.
- There are other project planning documents and standards that need to be generated (“draft and version protocols”, for example) but those are outside the scope of this project. This project is explicitly about the process of project management. I suppose that needs to be analyzed a bit more. Why would “draft and version protocols” not be a part of project management? Maybe they are but the purpose of this project is to create the “system” for collecting and presenting best practices in which subsets, like “draft and version protocols” can be appended.
Project Scope
Goal
After conducting the research above, it seems that the goal is to generate a “system” for storing project management practices and presenting those practices in a guide or template. My hunch is that this system will be a pdf or some other document but here is where these projects go off the rail. Rather than determining what the outcome will be now, this project will be handled in two phases, each with their own goal:
Phase 1 Goal: To research what content is needed for the project management repository
Phase 2 Goal: To present the repository content in a way that helps aid the project management process
Objectives for Phase I
- The research will identify practices listed in Retrospectives, practices used but not listed, and additional retrospectives that have been identified but not yet instituted.
- The research will analyze what content should and should not be considered for the repository.
- The research will determine a solution for the phase II goal.
Deliverables for Phase I
- Research
- Document the practices listed in the Retrospectives.
- Identify additional practices used that were not listed in Retrospectives.
- Determine additional practices that have not been instituted yet.
- Analyze
- Explore how much of what content should be included in this project.
- Plot the solution for this project and slate new projects in the All Project Deliverables table.
- Phase II
Action Items
- Add Research, Analyze, and Retrospective deliverables to the All Project Deliverables table.
- Initiate Retrospective post for this project and add scope information.