Deep Dive: Project Schedule Management: Define Activities

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by Elizabeth Harrin

A blog that looks at all aspects of project and program finances from budgets, estimating and accounting to getting a pay rise and managing contracts. Written by Elizabeth Harrin from RebelsGuideToPM.com.

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Categories: Scheduling

Today’s deep dive into the PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition is into the second part of Project Schedule Management: the Define Activities process. I’m going to call out the differences between this process and what we used to have in the PMBOK Guide® -- Fifth Edition.

The project schedule is the main output of the Project Schedule Management Knowledge Area (unsurprisingly) and the action really starts with Define Activities.

Define Activities Process

This is the second process in the Knowledge Area. We’re still in the Planning process group.

Basically, this process is about making an activity list, covering all the different activities that need to be done to complete the work of the project. There are some other outputs too – we’ll come to them in a minute. But think of this process as the creation of your master To Do list.

Inputs

There are some small changes to the Inputs between the PMBOK Guide® -- Fifth Edition and Sixth Edition. In the current edition, inputs are:

Project management plan
Enterprise environmental factors
Organisational process assets.

The schedule management plan and scope baseline have been ditched. That makes sense: the project management plan is such a broad, wide-ranging document that you don’t really have to specify the component parts.

Tools & Techniques

The Tools and Techniques for this process have changed slightly – meetings has been added (and if you want to get picky, it looks to me like the order of tools and techniques has been shifted around), which makes no practical difference day to day.

The addition of meetings makes sense in the context of the Knowledge Area. You can’t decide on what needs to be done unless you talk to people who are going to be doing the work, and you’ll do that through a meeting. That meeting could be informal, formal, a phone call, with lots of people or with one person.

Frankly, I think adding meetings in is a little bit pointless as it should go without saying that you have to talk to an expert in order to use expert judgment as a technique. But the PMBOK Guide® -- Sixth Edition is nothing if not diligent in setting out the detail.

Outputs

There are two new outputs: Change requests and Project management plan updates.

The point of adding change requests in here is because you should already have a scope baseline in place. As you work through the activities, talk to the right people and so on, you may uncover extra work that needs to be done – or work that doesn’t need to be done. This would generate a change request to amend the baselined scope.

Project management plan updates is a generic catch-all type of output that is included as anything you might do to create a schedule may have some kind of impact on the plan. For example, you might need to update the schedule or cost baselines. Once a change is approved, you’ll have to make changes to those documents too.