Direct and Manage Project Work

00:01 This module covers the direct and manage project work process from the PMBOK guide. The importance of this is very important because it's the main executing activity that we will undertake in the profession and project management. The difficulty is rated as low because you probably do a lot of this already. Memorization is a medium because there may be some new concepts in here you just haven't seen before.

00:28 The direct and manage project work process is an executing process, and as part of the Project Integration Management Knowledge Area, it is the single executing process in this knowledge area.

00:43 In relation to the domain tasks that it supports, the following are the ones that it supports.

00:52 Executing task to manage task execution based on the project management plan by leading and developing the project team in order to achieve project deliverables, executing task for implement approved changes and corrective actions by following the Change Management Plan in order to meet project requirements.

01:12 Executing Task five implement approved actions by following the risk management plan in order to minimize the impact of the risks and take advantage of opportunities on the project.

01:26 The key themes are that this is the part where you actually do what you said you were going to do.

01:34 Remember when you did all of that planning work? Well, this is where you do what you plan to do.

01:42 Another key theme, remember that all approved changes become work to be done and therefore constitute work that must be checked as well.

01:56 So let's start at the beginning with the inputs into the direct and manage project work process.

02:02 The first input is the project management plan, and you'll recall that this is an output from the developed project management plan process.

02:11 We need the Project Management Plan and all of its subsidiary plans, documents, baselines and registers because they outline the work that we're going to do.

02:20 So we simply couldn't do the work without it.

02:24 Another important input are the approved change requests.

02:29 These are the requested change requests that have been through the Perform Integrated Change Control process.

02:35 They've been properly assessed and they've been approved.

02:39 And as such, they constitute work to be done on the project.

02:43 So we use them as inputs into this process.

02:47 Other inputs that we may find useful are enterprise environmental factors, such things as external market conditions, which can affect the way in which we do the work.

02:59 Industry legislation and regulations as well.

03:03 We may also find organizational process assets to be an important input.

03:08 Things like how we do the work, our parts of our project management methodology, which guide us in the executing processes.

03:17 So we take these inputs, and if appropriate, we can apply the following tools and techniques to them in order to produce project deliverables.

03:28 The first total technique that may be useful to us is expert judgment.

03:33 Now, once again, remember you are an expert and in this case, your project team members are very important experts as they are the people who are going to be doing the work mainly.

03:44 You may also choose to use external experts to do the work.

03:49 So use their judgment.

03:51 Another tool and technique that you may choose to use.

03:54 Project management information systems.

03:57 This is any way which you choose to record, archive, distribute, disseminate any project information at all, particularly the information about what you're doing on the project and how well you're doing it. A third tool and technique that you may find useful are meetings.

04:17 These are regular weekly meetings that give records of how well you're doing against what you plan to do. Special meetings about particular parts of the project that are underway. The meetings that you choose to use will be up to you as long as they all support the execution of the project work.

04:37 The outputs that you may produce, if appropriate from the direct and manage project work process are first and foremost project deliverables. That's what a project is all about, after all, is producing those deliverables required of you.

04:54 Remember, the deliverables are not just the product deliverables.

04:58 They also include the wider project deliverables or the risk management work, the communications work, the quality management work.

05:05 But the deliverable that we're perhaps most interested in is the one the client wanted us to deliver. Now the deliverables, the output from this process go on to be used as an input into the control quality process.

05:20 The other outputs that we may find useful work performance data now, work performance data is raw information about the work that we're doing. It doesn't make sense yet until we transform it into work performance information and make it relevant and useful to us.

05:38 As a result of doing the work, we may also generate some change requests, we may detect that there are things that we need to change about the way we're doing the work or the work itself.

05:50 The change request as an output from this process go on to be an input into the perform integrated change control process, where they will be assessed and decisions made on them.

06:02 Other minor outputs from this process include any updates to the project management plan that we may wish to make and also any other project document updates.

06:13 These can be updates to our methodologies, our risk registers and any other guiding documents that we wish to make, including our lessons learned project documents as well.

06:26 So in summary, the direct and manage project work process is where you do the work you plan to do as per the approved plans. Now keep in mind that up to 30 per cent of the questions in the PMP exam come from executing processes just like this one. So pay particular attention to them.

06:50 So there we've covered the direct and manage project work process from the Project Integration Management Knowledge Area and discovered the importance of doing the work as we plan to do it.