We have heard a lot about processes in project management, but what is the process improvement plan? As you know, a project has many processes and they all belong to the five project management process groups. All the processes define “what to do when” in a particular part of the project life cycle. These processes can belong to project initiation process group, Project Planning Process group, Executing Process Group, project monitoring process group, and lastly to Project Closing process group.
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As also defined in the CAPM courses, the project management plan includes all the processes of the project. Process improvement plan is another component of project management plan. So project improvement plan belongs to develop project management plan process, which is in the project integration management knowledge area.
What is the objective of the Process Improvement Plan?
As we mentioned above, a company might have several processes for managing the project. If you want to learn more about these process groups, you should consider enrolling in a self-paced, online PMP certification training.
Project manager identifies existing processes to use on the project, or they may create some of their own. There may be some process of the company which already exists. For instance, scope management process, cost management process, procurement management process etc. These existing processes will be used by the project manager throughout the project life cycle.
However, there can also be new processes which were not needed previously but required for that particular project. In this case, the project manager must initiate to create a new process to deliver project outcomes faster. This is where this plan becomes important. The process improvement plan as the name suggests helps to improve these processes.
Let’s give an example to illustrate the aim of this plan better.
For instance, let’s consider that 100 PCs need to be installed during a project. And if these PCs will be identical with each other, installation steps will be the same for each PC. In order to complete these installations faster after first three installations, the project manager should create a process to complete remaining installations faster.
This may be a document including the set of steps to complete the installation. Or a software script that will install applications automatically on each PC can be developed to complete the installations faster.
Process Improvement plan describes how to improve existing processes and how to produce new processes depending on the project needs. These all must be outlined in process improvement plan.
Time is important in project management because there’s a schedule for each project. This plan helps to speed things up in an effective way. As a project manager, the process improvement plan will save you time and this way it will help you to focus more on other important processes. For further information about how to manage the processes of a project effectively, you can take a look for enrolling in an online Agile training.
