PMP Project Management Professional Study Guide, Third Edition (Certification Press)

Organizational planning is not planning to create an organization. Organizational planning is the process of mapping the project's roles, responsibilities, and reporting relationships to the appropriate people or groups of people. Organizational planning identifies the people involved with the project and determines what their role in the project is, whom they may report to-or receive a report from-and what their overall influence on the project work is.

Consider a project to create a community park. The project manager works for a commercial entity that will complete the project work. She identifies the people responsible for activities within her organization, the designers, engineers, installers, management, and so on. She will also have functional managers to coordinate employees' availability, financing to arrange procurement of resources needed for project completion, and senior management to report the status of the project work.

The project manager will also work and communicate with government officials for approval of the design, change requests, and overall schedule of the project. There'll be safety issues, landscaping questions, and other concerns that will come up as the project progresses.

Finally, the project manager will likely communicate with stakeholders that are not internal to her organization-for example, the people that live in the community and enjoy the park, and various government officials. These stakeholders will need to be involved in the planning and design of the park to ensure it satisfies the community's needs.

As you can see, organizational planning can involve both internal and external stakeholders. In most projects, organizational planning happens early in the project planning phase-but it should be reviewed and adjusted as the environment changes. Organizational planning is all about ensuring the project performs properly in the environment it is working in. Much of organizational planning focuses on communications-which we'll cover in the next chapter.

Identifying the Project Interfaces

Project interfaces are the people and groups the project manager and the project team will work with to complete the project. There are three types of interfaces:

• Organizational interfaces These are the folks within the performing organization that the project team will work with to complete the project work. For example, a project to install a centralized, real-time database for customer orders and manufacturing will require the Sales, Finance, Manufacturing, and Information Technology organizational units to be involved. The different organizational units may all be involved throughout the project life, or their level of involvement may fluctuate depending on the project needs.

• Technical interfaces The technical interfaces describe the relationship between the project and the technical disciplines' input to the project. Consider a project to create a new building. The technical interfaces would include architects, mechanical engineers, structural engineers, and others. These interfaces would be involved throughout the project phases-and also between project phases for inspections, change requests, and so on.

• Interpersonal Interfaces Interpersonal interfaces describe the reporting relationship among the people working on the project. Depending on the nature of the project and the information to be shared, the communication can be informal, such as a hallway meeting, or formal, such as a variance report. We'll discuss formal and informal communications in the next module.

Identifying the Staffing Requirements

Every project needs people to complete the work. Staffing requirements are the identified roles needed on a project to complete the assigned work. For example, a project to install a new telephone system throughout a campus would require a menagerie of workers with varying skill sets: hardware and software gurus, telephony experts, electricians, installers, and others. The identified staff would be pulled from the resource pool. Any skills gaps would need to be addressed through staff acquisition, additional training, or procurement.

Identifying the Project Constraints

Constraints limit. When it comes to human resource constraints, the project manager is dealing with any factors that limit options for project completion. This is where creativity comes into play: the project manager must find a way to creatively acquire, schedule, or train the needed resources to complete the project. Common constraints include:

• Organizational structure Recall the organizational structures: functional, weak matrix, balanced matrix, strong matrix, and projectized? The project manager's authority in the organization is relevant to the organizational structure he is forced to work within.

• Collective bargaining agreements The contractual agreements between employee groups, unions, or other labor organizations may serve as a constraint on the project. In these instances, there may be additional reporting relationships on the project status, work, and performance on project team members.

• Project Management Preferences If a project manager has had success with the organization and management of a project team in the past, the project manager will most likely want to re-create the success by following the same model. Current projects should emulate successful historical projects.

• Staffing Based on the competencies and talent of the project team, the assignments to activities are created. Project organization, scheduling, and workflow are often dependent on the abilities of the project team.

• Procurement When a particular qualification, skill, or specific person is requested as part of the project requirement, this requirement becomes a constraint on the project.

Exam Watch

When a labor union or other employee group is identified as a constraint, a reporting relationship, or other consideration of the project work, the union or group is considered a project stakeholder.