The Five Phases of a Project

Solution Preview

Project-Integrating a new email system
Phases of Project
1. Initiation
The first phase of the project is where we decide what must be done and what are the limits and constraints of the new project. This phase is the responsibility of the project sponsor who can individually or along with the project leader can review the project and approve it for next steps to take place. For integrating a new email system in the organization, there needs to be an assessment to ensure readiness of the organization for the project. The company needs to have a workshop where the scope of the project is outlined and stakeholder's needs are aligned with the project.
Following are the key knowledge areas which are a part of initiation phase of the project:
 Project Communications Management: Since initiation is the first step which marks the beginning of the project, it is important to keep all members of the project management team on the same page. Without proper communication, there can be misunderstandings due to breakdown in processes which could have a negative impact on the final outcome of the project. As a part of project communication management, there needs to be planning to determine what information needs to be communicated to all stakeholders in the project. Next, this information should be made available on a timely basis to all stakeholders.

2. Planning
In this phase the project team decides who would do the project, how much money would be required and how long would it take for the project to get completed. Planning phase consists of many steps, which are:
- Break-down of project into tasks which can be assigned to individuals
- Assigning resources to task and specifying calendar for resources
- Estimating task durations
- Specifying start date and finish date constraints
- Mapping predecessor dependencies and start date constraints to specify inactive lag delay among tasks
- Balancing overload and under load conflicts
Following knowledge areas come into play at this phase. These are:
- Project Scope Management: For the email integration, we need to scope out what needs to be produced, in our case; it is the integrated system with a new email system. Next we break this output into subparts to make it simpler to get the output. Project scope management is a formal plan which describes how project scope would be managed. Since the project is dependent on ...