project management process groups

Hello Class

There are five project management process groups: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring/controlling, and closing. During the initiating process, a definition of the project is made clear. Here, everyone involved within the project understands what will be done by who, along with the sponsor accepting the work that will be done. One of the challenges that may arise during the project is gaining a complete comprehension of the sponsor’s needs. If the project groups do not have a clear vision of the project, there must have been a loss of communication between the project managers and the sponsor. The next phase of the project is the planning process. Here the project is given a timeline, cost estimates and is planned out thoroughly. Some of the challenges during this step would be a timeline that does not match the sponsor’s needs, costs could be too high for the sponsor, and a lack of communication between each project group can make the project altogether fail. Everyone needs to be on the same page to execute the project effectively. The execution process of the project is putting the planning process into action. The project managers would need to ensure that all pieces of the project are coming together and that everyone is on the same flow to complete the project. Since the project manager will be the one to relay information to all groups involved in the project, the project managers must check in on each group to see if any problems have occurred. Effective leadership is needed, or else the groups may fall short of the deadline or effectively producing the final product. The last stage in the project management process is the closing process. The completed project is presented to the sponsor, and all stakeholders come together to discuss the project. If the sponsor is not pleased with the final product, the teams must go back to work if the sponsor wants to continue to work with the project people. Throughout the entirety of a project one of the main challenges is effectively communicating throughout with all the project groups.

Response 2

The five process groups of projects are initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and closing.  There are typical challenges that can come with all of these process groups that teams have to face.

Initiating process: Making sure the initiating process is ongoing and making sure everyone is caught up with their parts of the project can be a challenge. In the What went wrong? project example there was lack of communication and the project was unorganized.  

Planning process: There needs to be a plan for everything including a scope, a schedule, and a cost plan.  A challenge that can occur in this process is making sure all the plans are written out and are reasonable, plausible and the goal is clear to everyone involved. The IRS project was not planned well at all.  

Executing process: Lack of communication is a big challenge that can arise in this process.

Monitoring process: A challenge that can arise in this process is not keeping stakeholders involved in order to keep the project on track.  Stakeholders were not kept informed during the IRS project.   

Closing process:  Challenges that can occur here are properly closing down the project and making sure everything is documented such as lessons learned and receiving formal acceptance of the delivered work(Schwalbe, 2018). The IRS projects failed multiple times, so they did not receive formal acceptance and they did not learn from what went wrong in their previous attempts.