Organizational Process

Project Management / By

Organizational process assets

Organizational process assets tell you about how your company normally runs its projects.

There is a famous saying “Why re-invent the wheel”. The saying is quite self-explanatory, if there is something already in place, you do not need to create it again. e.g.: If your organizations have already a template of a project management plan from exactly the same kind of project that they have done a while back. Is it wise to use the template and alter it according to your project or create a new one?

The project manager and project management team extensively use Organizational Process Assets for the success of the project.In most organization, it is the responsibility of the project management team to search for the historical information before executing a project and collect all the necessary and relevant documentation.

Organizational process assets are the organization’s policies, guidelines, plan approaches, procedures and working standards.  These are the knowledge bases specific to and used by performing organization. They include many artifacts, practice and knowledge from any or all of the organization involved in the project than can be used to perform or govern the project.

These processes also include the organizations knowledge bases such as lesson learned and historical information. This also includes a wide range of elements that might affect several aspects of the project. It includes completed schedules, risk registers, EVM data, project management policies, safety policies, performance measurement criteria, templates, financials and procedures used to authorizing work. Throughout the project, the project team updates the organizational process assets as necessary.

Organizational process assets may be grouped in two categories.

  • Processes and procedures
  • Corporate knowledge base

Processes and procedures

Organizational process assets Vs. Process group

Process Group Organizational Process Asset
Initiating & Planning Guidelines and criteria for tailoring the organizations set of standard process to satisfy the specific needs of the project.
Human Resource Policies, Health and safety policies, Ethics policies and Project management policiesProduct and project life cycles and quality policies and procedures
Templates like risk register, WBS, Agreements, Diagrams
Executing, Monitoring and Controlling Change Control procedures,
Financial control procedures
Issue and defect management procedure
Organizational communication requirement
Procedure for prioritizing, approving and issuing work authorization
Risk control procedures
Standard guidelines, work instructions, proposal evaluation criteria and performance measurement criteria
Closing Project closure guidelines like lesson learned, project audits, project acceptance criteria etc.

Organizational process asset is also known as historical information. OPA and historical information are reviewed and examined when a new project is started. This information’s are very helpful for both project manager and stakeholders. When you are in process of review of a new project then these information play a vital role in determining whether the new project should be accepted and initiated. Historical information will helpful in preparing various documents like project charter, project management plan and other activities during the planning process group.

Most of the historical information can be handy during the planning process group. Understanding previous project of a similar nature – project problems, project outcomes, project risk, project cost and other information will help a project manager to avoid repeating mistakes done in previous project.

Many of the processes is having the organizational process assets as an input, because old assets will save your time and you will get a way which is already succeed in past. This will also work as a checklist for project manager that whether he has taken all the process in project or not.

Corporate knowledge base

Many project managers do not have their own historical database of previous projects, so they need to plan and estimate each project from the scratch.  This process of storing and retrieving information for a project is called creation of corporate knowledge base.

Corporate knowledge base includes

Configuration Management Version & baseline of all performing organization standards, policies, procedures and any project documents
Financial Database Labor hours, incurred cost, budgets and any other project cost overruns
Historical information & Lesson learned Project records and documents, all project closure information and documentation.
Issue and Defect Management Contains issue and defect status, control information, issue and defect resolution
Process measurement database Collect and make available measurement data on process and products
Project files from previous projects Scope, schedule, cost, performance measurement baseline, project calendars, project schedule, network diagram, risk register, planned response action and risk impacts.

Questions & Answers

  1. Close project or phase is used for generating, gathering and disseminating information to formalize a phase or project completion. All the following are outputs for close projects or phase EXCEPT
    • Final Product
    • Change request
    • Organizational process asset update
    • Final service

    Correct Answer: B

  2. All of the followings are inputs to Direct and Manage project execution except:
    • Project management plan
    • Report performance
    • Enterprise environmental factors
    • Organizational process assets/li>

    Correct Answer: B

  3. All the following are inputs for control scope EXCEPT
    • Project Management plan
    • Work performance information
    • Inspection
    • Organizational process asset

    Correct Answer: C

  4. All the following are inputs to define scope EXCEPT:
    1. Requirement documentation
    2. Project charter
    3. Organizational process assets
    4. Project deliverables

    Correct Answer: D

  5. All the following are inputs to define activities EXCEPT
    • Enterprise environmental factors
    • Organizational process assets
    • Scope Baseline
    • Mandatory and discretionary dependencies

    Correct Answer: D

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About Sparsh Goyal

A passionate IT professional, Sparsh Goyal boasts of 4.3+ years of experience. He has worked for various projects under AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Spring Boot, Python, Microservices, RESTful, RESTFUL APIs/SOAP, Scripting, Shell and JAVA. He is also working towards gaining proficiency in Oracle Cloud PaaS, DevOps, SaaS and Docker/Kubernetes. His primary and secondary skills validate his relentless pursuits of expanding his horizon and developing more as an IT person. He boasts of the following certifications: *Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer. *AWS Cloud Solutions Architect Associate. *Oracle certified JAVA programmer.

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