Chapter 3. The Project Planning Process Group

3. The Project Planning Process Group

Terms you'll need to understand:

	Activity
	Activity attributes
	Activity list
	Activity on arrow diagram (AOA)
	Activity on node diagram (AON)
	Activity sequence
	Analogous estimating
	Arrow diagramming method (ADM)
	Bottom-up estimating
	Critical path
	Dependency
	Milestone list
	Network diagram
	Parametric estimating
	Precedence diagramming method (PDM)
	Project management methodology
	Project management plan
	Project management processes
	Project scope
	Resource breakdown structure
	Rolling wave planning
	Slack
	Three-point estimates
	WBS dictionary
	Work breakdown structure (WBS)

Techniques and concepts you'll need to master:

	General project planning steps
	The importance of the WBS
	The relationships between scope, activities, and resources
	Estimating activity duration using three methods
	Creating PDM and ADM diagrams
	Reading and interpreting project network diagrams
	Understanding dependencies between project activities
	Identifying the critical path
	Estimating cost and creating a budget

In Chapter 1, "Project Management Framework Fundamentals," the PMI concepts of processes, process groups, and knowledge areas were introduced. Recall that PMI defines a total of 44 project processes that describe activities throughout a project's life cycle. These processes are organized into nine knowledge areas and represent five process groups. One of the most prominent of the process groups is project planning, evident in that nearly half of the processes occur in this group. This process group contains 21 of the 44 processes. In case you might think that planning processes are localized to a particular area of your project, note that processes in the planning group span all nine knowledge areas. Let's look at project planning in more detail.