Project Initiation and Planning
Domain 2: Project Initiation and Planning
This domain tests how a project moves from an approved idea to an executable baseline. Questions focus on the business case and charter, stakeholder identification, requirements and scope definition, the WBS, schedule and cost estimating, risk planning, and the subsidiary plans that make execution controllable.
Core rules and concepts
- The business case justifies the investment; the charter formally authorizes the project and names the project manager. The charter contains purpose, measurable objectives, high-level scope and deliverables, milestones, summary budget, sponsor, and the project manager's authority level.
- Assumptions are believed true without proof; constraints are limits. Both belong in the charter and must be validated during planning.
- Identify stakeholders early and analyze interest, influence, and impact. The stakeholder register feeds the communication plan.
- Requirements need a traceability path from business need to deliverable to acceptance criteria. Unclear acceptance criteria create later disputes.
- The WBS decomposes scope into work packages. Apply the 100% rule: the WBS contains all work and only the work needed for the scope. Work packages are estimable and assignable; milestones are points in time, not work.
- Schedule development uses dependency types, leads and lags, duration estimates, and critical path. Critical path is the longest path through the network and has zero or minimum float; it sets the shortest possible duration.
- Cost estimating methods include analogous (top-down, historical), parametric (unit rate), bottom-up (WBS-based), and three-point (optimistic, most likely, pessimistic). Bottom-up is more accurate but costlier to prepare.
- Risk planning records causes, events, and impacts, then assigns response strategies. Plans for quality, resources, procurement, and communication complete the planning baseline.
Worked example
A team plans a customer portal. The WBS has five work packages: requirements, design, build, test, and deploy. Build depends on design; test depends on build; deploy depends on test. Requirements and design can overlap by one week using a lead. The path requirements-design-build-test-deploy is longest at 14 weeks; a parallel documentation package has 9 weeks and 5 weeks of float. The project manager focuses schedule control on the 14-week path and uses float on documentation only with change control. Bottom-up estimating from work packages gives a defensible cost baseline; a top-down analogous estimate would be faster but less accurate.
Traps that cost marks
- Starting execution before the charter is approved.
- Treating the WBS as an org chart or a to-do list rather than a scope decomposition.
- Confusing milestones with activities and assigning duration to a milestone.
- Ignoring leads, lags, and resource availability when calculating critical path.
- Planning only for negative risks and omitting opportunity responses.
- Writing a communication plan without stakeholder analysis.