ISACA COBIT 5 – Define (BOK IV) Part 6

14. Project Charter Review (BOK IV.B.6)

So in our discussion on project charter, we have talked about business case, we have talked about problem statement, scope, goals and objectives and performance measures. In this video, let’s look at three left out elements which are charter review, plan and team member commitment. So here we have the project charter. If you look at the main body of this, we already talked about these five elements. So once you have finalized your business case, your scope, your statement, your goal and your expected saving, now you need some buy in from stakeholders, from your sponsor. And that is achieved by getting charter reviewed and signed off.

Once this is reviewed and signed off, this becomes a sort of a contract, a contract between you and your management. Now your management is expecting some results from you and at the same time management is committing resources needed for this project. Another few things which we have in this charter is the plan, the very high level plan.

Your high level plan goes here. Under the project plan you can have things like DF or Define phase, measure, analyze, Improve and Control. So each phase you can list down here when this phase is expected to start and when this phase is expected to, and you put those dates here. And then once you have actually completed a phase, then you put your actual completion date here. One thing which we are not talking here is gate review. After each stage, after each phase of DMAC, there is a gate review, also known as toll gate review. So this is conducted to ensure things are going fine.

And if things are going fine, is the project still valid? Do we need to change scope? Do we need to make any changes to that? That review is done after each phase of the Six Sigma project. We will be talking about that toll gate review later, somewhere later in this course. In addition to that, you include your team members also here in this box, name of the team members, what’s their role and what percent commitment you have.

Is this person full time committed to the project or will this person be spending 10% of his or her time on the project? That you list down here. Once you list down here, it gets signed off by the reviewers, the sponsor, the stakeholders. Then there is a commitment that this is what these people need to contribute to the project.

So looking at the charter review, as we have already talked, charter review basically ensures that you have stakeholders involvement and buy in from them. So with this we complete our discussion on project charter, why we need charter, how we prepare that. We looked at a sample template from Sigma Excel and we looked at each element of that charter in detail. And this is a key deliverable in the phase of the project. And when I say D phase, which is the defined phase, in the defined phase, project charter is very critical deliverable which needs to be completed to ensure successful completion of your Six Sigma project.

15. Project Managament Tools – Gantt Chart (BOK IV.C.1)

Hey, welcome back. In the defined phase of the project so far we have talked about the voice of the customer. That was the first major topic here in the defined phase. And then we talked about project charter. Another things which you need to learn in the defined phase is some project management tools which you will be using. Because Six Sigma project is also a project. Just like any other project. This is also a project which has a definite beginning and definite ending and a specific purpose to be achieved. So this is a project. So you need some basic project management tools which can help you in making sure that this project is completed in time. And it covers all the scope which was required to be covered. So for that, there are some specific tools. So here I have a list of four tools which we will be covering in this section. Number one is Gantt Chart. Gantt Chart will help you in planning the schedule of the project, when some activity is going to start, when something is going to finish, and whether we are on time or not. This tool is going to help you with that. Another tool is toll gate review. This will help you in understanding that after each phase of the project there is going to be a review of the project which will allow it to go further or will stop it there. We will talk about that once we reach there.

Another thing is work breakdown structure, which is basically breaking down your project into smaller wide size pieces, pieces which you can easily work on. So this is basically breaking down your project into smaller pieces, so that you can assign responsibilities to individual. One piece can be attended by one person, another piece can be attended by another person. And that is where the work breakdown structure or WBS is going to help you with. Another is Racy model. Racy Model will help you with the communication within the team, who is responsible, who is accountable, who is to be consulted and who is to be informed. So this will keep things on track that people will know who is responsible for what. So people will have a basic understanding of roles and responsibility using Racy models. Some of these could be the output of your defined phase as a deliverable. So in defined phase probably you might have a Gantt Chart, WBS or Racy Model as a deliverable of your defined phase. Let’s go one by one and understand each of these. Let’s start that with Gantt chart.

So, coming to Gantt Chart as a project management tool, gantt Chart is a type of bar chart. So it has number of bars. Each bar is related to a specific activity and the length of bar corresponds to the time required. So the Gantt chart will have the starting date, finishing date and the summary of the element. So how does this look like? Let’s quickly. Look at that first. So this will be something like this, where you will have activities. So activity number one, two, three or four or five activities could be in a very simple terms, this could be phases of the project. So this could be the defined phase. This could be M AIC. So five activities in the project might be five stages of the project. And then this will be the time scale. So here you have a time scale. So you will have like from week zero to week three. Let’s say you will have defined phase and then you will have measure phase. Probably you might want to start measure phase along with the defined phase.

So let’s say you might start your measurement phase from here itself, having some overlap with the defined phase. Then you have analyzed phase. So measurement and analyze might have some sort of overlap. And these are all weeks, so week 1234-5678. So depending on the time, the length of this bar will change. So length is corresponding to the time, and then you will have a control. So once you have a look at this Gantt chart, at a specific time, you can draw a line. So let’s say when you are at week number six, so you can draw a line here that at week six, what is the progress? So if defined phase has already been completed, so you will make this as a dark that this particular activity has been completed. This activity has been completed. And let’s say at week six, suppose you are so advanced that you have completed the analyze as well.

So you might want to darken this as well. So now someone looking at this can directly see that you are way ahead of schedule, because at week six, you are supposed to have analyzed work partially completed. But instead of partially completed, you have already done this whole analyzed work. And suppose even at that time you have done half of the implementation things. Also then half of this bar, you will make it black at week number six, because the line here is at week number six. So that’s how you draw a Gantt chart. You can draw this on a plain paper with the help of some bars. Or you might want to use Excel, Microsoft Excel for drawing that. Microsoft Excel gives you a very nice template for making Gantt chart. Let’s look at that. How do we do that? That gives you a very professional output. So on the next slide, let’s look at how Microsoft Excel output looks like. So here you have a sample of the Gantt chart, which I’ll be demonstrating just now after this slide. And here you have activities on this. So you can write down all your activities which you have.

And then what is the planned start date, what’s the planned duration of that activity? What’s the actual start? What’s actual duration and what is the percentage completed? And based on that, Microsoft Excel will draw this chart which will tell you where you stand. So in this example, if you see this line which is highlighted, one represents where you are currently. Let’s look at that. Using Microsoft Excel. How does this look like and how to draw again chart in Microsoft Excel. So here we have Microsoft Excel 2013. And I don’t think you will have this template in the prior versions, but 2013 afterwards you will have this template of Gantt chart in Microsoft Excel 2013. So to draw that we go to file, we go to new, we want to create a new file. And here you have all the templates. So you can find the template for Gantt chart here, which is with the name of Project Planner. So if you cannot find it, you just want to search for Project Planner. Let’s look at that.

So here I have project planner, which is Gantt project planner. So this is what I need. This template is what I need. So I click on that and I ask to create a document using this template. So create and here I have a nicely presentable Gantt chart readily available. The only thing I need to do here is go to activity one and change that to, let’s say define phase. So that’s my defined phase. Activity two is my measurement phase and so on. So you can define your activities here. What’s the starting time? So plan start is week number one and plan duration is instead of five. Let’s say this one is going to take four weeks. So you change that to four weeks. Actual start is one and actual duration is one and actual duration is four. So probably at the time of planning, the actual duration would be zero at this time and the progress is also zero.

So this is how you will be having at the starting of the project. But once you have gone to the next week, I change the period to fourth week. Now, once we have reached to the fourth week and at that time, if you have evaluated and you looked at that, then the for the defined phase, you might find out that the actual duration was three weeks. So you finishes that in three weeks and you completed defined phase 100% in three weeks. So this is automatically going to update that in three weeks. You have already completed 100% completed the defined phase. If you look at the measurement phase example here, this was supposed to take six weeks and it actually took six weeks, 100% completed. So you see everything as a dark bar because the whole thing is dark here. In the previous case, this was planned to be completed in four weeks, but you completed that in three weeks. And similarly, you can change all your other activities, update the progress as you move, and move this highlight period to the time where you are currently. So ten weeks from the start of the project, you will take this bar to week number ten. So this is we’ll be telling you that now we are in week number ten and what all has been achieved and what all is pending. So that is how you draw a Gantt chart in Microsoft Excel 2013 or the later version of Microsoft Excel.

16. Project Managament Tools – Toll-gate Reviews (BOK IV.C.2)

So, in the topic of project management tools, earlier we talked about Gantt chart. Gantt chart for monitoring the progress of the project. Now, let’s look at the second tool, which is Toll Gate Reviews. What is that and what does that mean? Let’s go through that. On next slide, toll Gate reviews are checkpoints to confirm if the work has been progressed as per plan or not. So we have five phases in six sigma define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control. After each stage, there is a gate, there is a review or there is a checkpoint to see whether all the requirements of that particular phase have been completed or not.

So, once you complete Define phase, then you go through a checkpoint or you go through a toll gate to see whether all the requirements related to defined phase have been completed. So, if all the requirements have been completed successfully, then you are allowed to go to the next phase, which is Measurement phase. So one thing is to review the progress, whether all the deliverable, all the progress, all the planned activities have been completed or not. The second part of this review is for management to see whether these things still make sense or not. So when you were in defined phase, you would have gone through that problem, you would have understood the problem. After that, once you make a presentation to stakeholders, they might want to change their mind, they might want to drop the project, change the scope, reduce the scope, enhance the scope. Whatever that is required will be done in that gate review.

And this review is conducted by sponsor and stakeholders. So at that time they look at that, what’s the progress? Do you require additional support? So probably that’s your thing to mention at that time if you need additional support, if you have found some hurdles which are not allowing you to complete this project, you can highlight that. Management can look at your progress, management can look at the scope, whether the scope is still valid or not, whether the goals which you initially thought are the same, or do they need to be changed? So that’s what happened in Toll gate review. The output or deliverable of this could be the minutes of meeting which you have as a part of Toll Gate Review or the presentation which you make to the sponsor and the stakeholders.

So here on this slide, I have represented those gate reviews or toll gates after each phase of the activity. So you have a Define and Measure phase. And in between these two phases, there is a Toll Gate review or the Gate Review. Similarly, after measurement phase and analyze phase, there is a Toll gate review and for another two phases also, there are gate reviews. After each of the phase completion, there are certain things which you need to do in each phase. All those things are evaluated in this Toll gate review.

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