by John D Carmack

Created on: July 01, 2009

What are the minimal items you need to run a project? If you want a decent shot at project success, there are certain elements you need to address, either formally or informally. The larger the project, the more important it is to address these elements formally. Except for very small projects, at minimum, you need a project charter, project team, requirements, project scope statement, work breakdown structure, project schedule, risk and issues plan and a quality test plan.

Before getting into each of these areas, it is important to understand that a key project management concept is progressive elaboration. Each of the items being discussed may change as a result of the process of progressive elaboration. That means clarity is added to a plan when a greater level of detail is achieved as more specific information is discovered. Requirements, for example, will start at a very high level and will be lacking a great deal of detail. As requirements are gathered, however, they become more specific and concrete.

Project Charter

A project charter officially authorizes the project. It will be a high level statement of what the project is trying to accomplish. This statement will feed into gathering project requirements.

Project Team

Needless to say, you need people to work on the project. Acquiring a project team isn't usually a one-time effort, however. For example, business analysts or requirements managers will be utilized heavily during the initial phases of a project, but their participation will gradually drop as the project moves forward. Likewise, higher level team members may be involved to provide technical expertise during the planning phase of a project, but less experienced team members may be used to execute the plan.

Requirements

Partial, vague or incorrect requirements are cited as reasons for project failure over and over again in surveys and questionnaires. It is important to start with the business needs. Subsequent levels of requirements must map back to a valid business need. Too often, a technical change that had no underlying business need has needlessly caused a poor quality product. This goes with the saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

There are different levels of requirements. Progressive elaboration means starting with the higher level requirement and then drilling down.

1. Business Requirements are the stated business need. They need to be in business terminology. It is OK to use technical terms for

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