Natalie Lamb and the APM Project Management Qualification: Project lifecycle from procurement to termination

Members of my team recently attended a course on project management so I borrowed the APM Project Management Qualification Study Guide (2014) to give myself a bit of an insight into project management and how it links into PhDs or other similar research. This post is part of a series of posts I have produced to better split project management into a few easily digestible sections. 


Procurement

• Procurement = how an organisation acquires its goods and services
• Procurement strategy = how the project will procure and manage goods and services 
• Includes: make or buy decision (e.g. could the goods be made in house cheaper?), contractual relationship (buy from one supplier or many?), reimbursement methods, supplier selection 
• Types of contractual relationships
• Single contracts- single client, single supplier, single contractor 
• Parallel contracts- multiple single contracts with a number of contractors 
• Sequential contracts- one supplier doing one task then another doing one after
• Prime and subcontracts- one main supplier who sources others
• Turnkey contracts- single supplier provides all goods and services
• Partnering- two/+ organisations work together to achieve the project 
• How to select suppliers
• Research the market
• Pre-qualify suppliers- reduce the list of potential supplier to a manageable number
• Issue an invitation to tender
• Answer questions the bidders have raised
• Receive and evaluate bids and review against selection criteria
• Award a contract

Types of project review

• Gate reviews
• A formal review usually commissioned by the sponsoring organisation
• A formal checklist with the outcomes of pass/pass with reservation/fail
• Helps track progress and form relationships
• Post project review
• Carried out as soon as the project is finished to capture lessons learned
• Will consider the normal success criteria, effectiveness of the project management methods, tools, practises and team performance
• Benefits realisation reviews
• After the products and handover completed so a full evaluation of the benefits can be done
• Managed and chaired by the sponsor
• To assess the achievement of the stated benefits in the business case
• Stage reviews
• During the project to assess progress using key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Convened by the project manager, supported by the team, chaired by the sponsor and uses 
• Peer reviews
• At any time
• Completed by colleagues of the project manager or sponsor
• Scrutinise how a project is being ran

Quality control 

• Quality = an assessment of a product’s fitness for purpose
• Quality plan includes: roles and responsibilities concerned with quality, the processes used, continual improvement, project assurance techniques, quality control techniques, interactions with other processes
• Quality assurance = demonstrated and providing confidence to all stakeholders that quality requirements will be achieved
• Incorporates: training, audits, lessons learnt, supplier accreditation 
• Quality control 
• Can include: inspection and measurement, walk-throughs (more in-depth than inspection and measurement), pareto analysis (understanding the nature and root causes of observable faults), process control charts (e.g. how sample product has varied over time)
• Quality management benefits: prevents problems, gives stakeholders confidence they are getting what they have asked, reduces rework to save on costs, reduces risks, improves efficiency

Project lifecycle

• Project lifecycle = the evolutionary progression through the phases of a project and the broad flow of the project 
• Helps to demonstrate progress and review future work to be completed
• The concept phase- everything up to and including the production of the business case, overseen by the sponsor
• The definition phase- production of a project management plan
• The development phase- the construction of the components needed for the end product, as set out in the project management plan, which may include different stages and stage reviews for progress evaluation
• Handover- commissioning the products by project team
• Formal hand over the deliverables to the users and make sure they have everything in place to cope with any issues in the short term (long term, the users have to cope without assistance)
• Create operating procedures
• Have a form of final acceptance
• Closure- the closure of the project and disbanding of the project team 
• Ensure users know how to operate products 
• Can also include an extended project life cycle, including a benefits realisation phase and an investigation into operations
• Termination- how much it will cost to dispose of the product at the end of its useful life 

Glossary

• APM = Association for Project Management
• Procurement = how an organisation acquires its goods and services
• Procurement strategy = how the project will procure and manage goods and services 
• Quality = an assessment of a product’s fitness for purpose
• Project lifecycle = the evolutionary progression through the phases of a project and the broad flow of the project 
• KPI = key performance indicator

References

• Association for Project Management (2014), APM Project Management Qualification Study Guide, Association for Project Management, Buckinghamshire.