Define Activities

00:01 This module covers the defined activities process in the PMBOK guide.

00:07 It's really important that you pay attention to this because it's the first of the activities we do in order to produce the project schedule, and that's why we give it such a high exam importance.

00:18 The difficulty is rated as medium because you may not have done this before.

00:23 Memorization is low, though, because none of the concepts should be completely new to you.

00:29 So the define activities process is part of the project time management knowledge area.

00:34 In fact, it's the second of six Planning activities.

00:38 But after the production of the schedule management plan by the plan schedule management process, it is in fact the first of the activities that we go through in order to end up producing our project schedule.

00:51 So if you follow those processes through, we see that first, we define the activities and produce an activity list.

00:57 We then we take those activities and we put them in the sequence in which they occur and indicate the relationships and dependencies between them with a network diagram. We can then go off to usually first estimate activity resources and then with that information, estimate the activity durations.

01:15 And with all of this information combined, we can then develop the schedule.

01:20 So the defined activities is the necessary first step in that process of producing a project schedule.

01:28 Of course, once we have our project schedule, we can then control the schedule and look at what we think we should be doing against what we're actually doing and look for variants. So the particular domain task that the defined activities process helps us understand better is the planning task for which says develop the project schedule based on the approved project deliverables and milestones, scope and resource management plans in order to manage timely completion of the project.

02:00 And of course, the single domain task actually covers all six of those project time management processes.

02:10 So in summary, the key themes of define activities process includes take our project scope, particularly the WBS, and break it down from work package level down further down to activity level.

02:26 And once we've done that, we produce an activity list for our project.

02:33 So we start with potential inputs that we may find useful.

02:37 The first one is, of course, the project management plan, particularly the schedule management plan, as part of it, because it's the schedule management plan, which tells us how we're going to do this activity.

02:50 The next most important input will, of course, be the scope baseline.

02:54 Now remember, the scope baseline is made up of three elements the scope statement, the WBS work breakdown structure and the WBS dictionary. The one that we're particularly interested there as an input is, of course, the work breakdown structure.

03:11 Remember, the work breakdown structure has used decomposition to break down our project scope from deliverable to sub deliverable to work package level, and that's where it stopped.

03:22 We're going to go one step further and break them down to activity level to get our activity list.

03:29 We may also find enterprise environmental factors and organizational process assets useful to us in developing our activity list.

03:39 The particular tools and techniques that we may find useful include decomposition. Now we saw decomposition used as the primary tool and the creation of the work breakdown structure.

03:52 And when we used it there for the creation of the work breakdown structure, we took our project scope statement and we use decomposition to break it down from deliverable to sub deliverable to work package level and remember for the purpose of the WBS. That's where we stopped at work package level.

04:10 For the purposes of producing our project schedule, though, we want an activity list, so we take it one step further and produce our activities.

04:19 We decompose that one step further down to activity level.

04:23 The difference between work, package and activity can be a somewhat arbitrary distinction. Often, a work package is described and defined as a level of work that can be reliably estimated for cost, a level of work that can be reliably estimated for time.

04:39 A level of work where the benefits of decomposing it even further don't outweigh the costs of doing it.

04:47 And some people will also say that a work package is the level at which can be assigned to a single person.

04:54 Regardless of your definition of the work package, though, the activity is listed as below that. So defining an activity means coming down to those exact hourly things that need to be done half day, things that need to be done.

05:08 Those are activities, not work package.

05:11 The other tool that we need to be aware of is rolling wave Planning.

05:16 Now, rolling wave Planning is a critical part of the profession of project management, and what it tells us is that as we proceed through a project, particularly a long term project, we may choose to plan in detail.

05:29 That time period, immediately in front of us, perhaps we're on a 12 month project, and what we will do is plan in detail, perhaps the month or two directly in front of us, perhaps from two to six months.

05:43 We don't plan in as much detail and for six to 12 months out, our detail is even less.

05:50 But as we move through the project, we keep re-planning it.

05:55 That's what rolling wave Planning is.

05:57 It's a form of progressive elaboration.

06:00 The third total technique that we may find useful is, of course, the most popular total technique in the PMBOK guide, and that's expert judgment.

06:08 So remember you're an expert.

06:10 Your project team members are experts and other people that you choose to consult or experts. And as a general rule, always involved the people doing the work and defining the work.

06:21 So here we're trying to define the activities, so we should always go and talk with those people who are going to do those activities and they will have the best information to help us define them.

06:34 The outputs that we may generate as a result of defining our activities are our activity list.

06:42 And this is exactly what it says it is.

06:44 It is a list of all the activities on our project.

06:48 Obviously, we'll give each one a number as part of our configuration management system.

06:53 But there it is, the single list.

06:55 Now, it's not a project schedule at this point.

06:58 It doesn't have dependencies and relationships.

07:01 It doesn't have durations attached to it, and it's not presented in a network diagram or Gantt-Chart format.

07:07 All it is is a list of all the activities that we're going to use.

07:12 This activity list is an output from this process will go on to be used as an input into some of the other time management planning processes.

07:22 In addition to the activity list, we may also choose to produce activity attributes. Now, throughout the PMBOK guide, there's often what I call a primary document and a secondary document.

07:35 We saw this already with a WBS and the WBS dictionary.

07:40 Here we see it again with the activity list and the activity attributes, the activity list itself can be seen only.

07:47 Summary Information about each of the activities by the activity attributes can tell us more information about each of the activities.

07:55 How did we arrive at that activity? What do we know about that activity? What constraints may be upon that activity? So we may also choose to produce an activity attributes document to complement our activity list and give us more information as a result of producing our activities, though, we may also produce a milestone list. It may become apparent at this point that certain milestones need to be hit, and we produce that milestone list, which said we've got to hit this milestone at this point.

08:27 The next milestone at that point and the milestones themselves can become activities. Remember, though, when we come to assigning duration to a milestone, a milestone has zero duration.

08:39 That's very important when we come to doing our project schedule.

08:42 So now what we have after doing the defined activities process is our activity list, our activity attributes and our milestone list.

08:51 Each of these outputs will go on to be inputs into other time management planning areas as we iteratively do the work to build up our approved project schedule.

09:04 So remember, the activity list is an output as a list of all the activities that we're going to do on the project.

09:11 Remember, it's subject to progressive elaboration.

09:13 We may not know all of them over the whole project, but instead breakdown those in the immediate future.

09:19 The activities attributes a more detailed description of the activities, and that milestones list identifies all of the important milestones as a separate and distinct list, and some of them may have come from our project charter.

09:34 So in summary, the defined activities process and the PMBOK guide focuses on the development of the activity list as the first step in the sequential production of the eventual project schedule.

09:48 This has been an introduction and an overview to the defined activities process in the Pim Bot guide.