myPmps: the Project Scope Statement
The Task
During the last 20 years project management has become an important profession. Hence great and large project management organizations have been founded. For example the Project Management Institute, also known as PMI. Or the german association of project management, also known as GPM. Both organizations want to standardize the project management profession. And both are presuming that software can facilitate the pm work. On this base we can ask some simple questions:
- Can we already do the whole standardized project management work on the base of free open source software?
- How do we know which software is still missed?
The Project Management Body of Knowledge deliveres the base to answer these questions:
The PMBOK® describes all project management knowledge areas as set of interacting project management processes. Each of these processes takes a set of documents as input and generates or updates a set of documents as output. And for each process the PMBOK® contains a chapter 'Tools and Techniques'. Hence one could classify open source project management software as tools and techniques of those processes which they support. This leads to a list of already usable software and to a list of desiderata. Both is helpful for making project management a free open source software driven profession. If we have such a software list for each of the processes and if we can generate each of the output documents by free software we can be sure that we are able to do the whole work of project management on the base of free open source software.
The Solution
With respect to that idea and following the PMBOK® standard let myPmps offer ...
- ... one record card (page) for each PMI project management process. This card shall describe the process, shall list its required input documents and delivered output documents and shall contain a section 'tools and techniques' supplemented by a section 'open source tools' listing free open source software which assists this process
- ... different ways to reach these record cards:
- a Knowledge Area Survey of the myPmps menu shall offer a direct access to the process cards.
- a Conceptual Survey shall assign each process to its' knowledge area and its' process group.
- a Sequential Survey shall offer - as far as possible - a sequence of preceding and succeeding project management processes by following the input/output structure. An IO Survey shall document the base of this sequential view.
- ... a list of discriptions of free open source project management software and a classifying table of open source software indicating which PMI processes an open source application supports
- ... a set of scripts, applications and templates of project management documents filling the lags discovered by the classifying table.
The Roadmap
Let this scope being realized in two phases. Let these two project phases being defined by two sets of usecases, the basic usecases and the extended usecases. And let these phases and usecases being embedded into a complete milstonelist .