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Services Provided by PMO

• Management of complex strategic Senior Leadership Team (SLT) sponsored projects, programs and portfolios using both waterfall and Scrum/Agile methodologies
• Management of college/departmental sponsored projects, programs and portfolios  using both waterfall and Scrum/Agile methodologies
• Management of Discovery Process
• Business Case development and support
• Business Analysis
• Process Mapping and Optimization
• Support for project mapping against departmental goals and objectives 
• Building Smartsheet solutions to support group and department work
• Tailored Smartsheet support and training for groups/department

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Project Management at Northeastern

Finish your project on time, on budget, and within scope  

Agile and Scrum

Agile is a project management philosophy that utilizes a core set of values or principles. It has been around for quite some time now but really began to take off in 2001 when the Agile Manifesto was published. It emphasized:

• · Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• · Working Software over comprehensive documentation
• · Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• · Responding to change over following a plan

Scrum on the other hand is an agile project management framework that helps teams’ structure and manage their work through a set of values, principles, and practices. It traces its origin to Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber publishers of the Official Scrum Guide. Scrum teams use sprints (one – four-week intervals) to complete a pre-assigned amount of work. They meet daily for 15 minutes (stand ups) to discuss what they did the previous day, what they are doing today and any blockers they are encountering. The team is organized into a Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development team.

Key Responsibilities of a Project Manager

1. Pre-Initiating/Initiating

The decision to pursue a project is perhaps the biggest decision made on the project. Projects should get approved based on the value that it will bring to the organization. In what we call the “Pre-Initiation” phase of the project, a Business Case is developed to justify the reasons of why a project should be approved. Typically, a Business Case briefly describes the project background, the goals, the high-level scope of the project, its estimated cost and duration. It also should include alternatives that were considered and why those alternatives were not put forward.

Once the Business Case has been presented to senior leadership and approved, that is when the project is officially initiated. This is the first phase of the project lifecycle, and it is where a project manager is selected, a project team is approved, a document repository is created and perhaps most importantly a Project Charter document is created and approved.

Among the key sections of a Project Charter are more details on project background, its goals, scope (including what is out of scope), milestones, “estimated” timelines, risks, assumptions, constraints, dependencies, and key stakeholders. The Project Charter should be developed with the input of the entire team and then shared with the sponsor and business owner for their feedback and ultimately approval. It is very important that the Project Charter gets approved by the sponsor, business owner and other key stakeholders as it assures that everyone has the same understanding and aspirations for the direction of the project.

2. Planning

When the Project Charter has been approved, the project enters the Planning phase. This is an important step as it provides the project team a roadmap that reduces uncertainty, increases understanding, and improves efficiency (Wysocki, 2014, p. 145). Additionally, many planning artifacts such as “Project Schedule”, “Communications Management Plan” and the “Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed (RACI)” are used. The artifacts prepared during this phase will depend on the project and what level of rigor the project manager deems appropriate.

One of the most important artifacts prepared during the planning phase is the project schedule. Essentially this is a decomposition of the deliverables and key milestones taken from the scope section in the Project Charter. It includes all the tasks associated with each deliverable, estimated start and finish dates, percent complete for each task and who is accountable for each task.

Other key areas in the planning phase include risk management, communications management, quality management, etc.

3. Executing

During this phase, team members complete the work that has been identified in the project schedule to reach the goals of the project. The project manager’s role is to manage this work and to ensure that tasks are completed as scheduled. Typically, weekly team meetings are held where team members give an update on their work and discuss any issues they are having. It is also good practice to keep an eye on any project risks whose probability of occurrence might have increase. The project manager and team can discuss mitigation and/or contingency plans for such risks.

It is very important during this phase that frequent and accurate communication is happening. Typically, weekly status reports are prepared by the project manager and distributed to the project team, project sponsor, business owner(s) and key stakeholders. The project manager should also be holding frequent project update meetings with the sponsor and steering committee. At these meetings, the project manager can discuss and change in scope items, issues that the team alone cannot resolve and any budget discrepancies.

4. Monitoring and Controlling

Monitoring and controlling processes commence at the beginning of a project and are repeated in each phase of the project. In the monitoring and controlling process, a project manager’s work includes:

• Monitoring the progress of a project
• Ensuring that key milestones are reached
• Comparing actual performance against planned/scheduled performance

Of course, things rarely go exactly to plan. Therefore, a project manager must be flexible enough to work within a project’s plan but readily adapt when necessary.

5. Closing

During this phase, the project manager strives to ensure all activities necessary to achieve the final result are completed. Project managers will work with the client/sponsor to get formal sign-off.

After the project has been completed, a post-implementation review is often used to identify key lessons learned. Understanding what went well, what could be done differently, and what to stop doing can help inform and improve project management practices moving forward.

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Frequently Asked Questions