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Project Environment

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Project Environment - Definition and Importance

Summary: The project environment describes the totality of all internal and external influencing factors that have an impact on a project and significantly influence its success. Therefore, a detailed analysis and control of the project environment is essential for the successful management of a project.

The Project Environment in Detail

A project is always embedded in a specific environment, which consists of a multitude of influencing factors. These factors can be both internal (within the organization) and external (outside the organization) and influence the planning, execution, and outcome of a project. The project environment is therefore an important part of project work and should be considered in the planning and control of a project.

Internal Influencing Factors

Internal influencing factors are those that occur within the organization and have an impact on the project. These include, among others:

  • Organizational Structure : The organizational structure of a company, the responsibilities and competencies, as well as the available resources and communication channels have a direct influence on the project.
  • Corporate Strategy : The strategic orientation of the company and the resulting goals and priorities affect the project work, for example in terms of the project's relevance to the company and the resources provided.
  • Corporate Culture: The values, norms, and behaviors of the employees as well as the internal working climate can influence the cooperation in the project team and the acceptance of the project results.
  • Project Team : The professional and social competencies of the project staff, their motivation, and their commitment are decisive factors for the success of the project.
  • Resources: The availability of personnel, budget, time, and technical equipment has an immediate impact on the execution of the project.

External Influencing Factors

External influencing factors are those that lie outside the organization and have an impact on the project. These include, among others:

  • Market: Market conditions such as supply and demand, competitive situation, price development, and customer needs influence the requirements for the project outcome and its prospects for success.
  • Technological Developments: Technological progress and innovations can represent opportunities and risks for the project, such as through new approaches to solutions or changed conditions.
  • Political and Legal Framework: Laws, regulations, standards, and political decisions can influence the execution and goals of the project and must be taken into account in planning.
  • Environment: Ecological aspects such as environmental regulations, sustainability requirements, and the consideration of environmental concerns can influence the project work and the project outcome.
  • Stakeholders: External interest groups such as customers, suppliers, partner companies, or societal groups can influence the project, for example through requirements, expectations, or criticism.

Project Environment Analysis

To systematically capture the project environment and identify potential opportunities and risks, a project environment analysis should be conducted. This analysis includes the identification of relevant internal and external influencing factors, the assessment of their impact on the project, and the derivation of recommendations for project management .A proven instrument for the project environment analysis is the SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). It identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the project (internal factors) as well as the opportunities and risks from the project environment (external factors) and compares them. The results of the SWOT analysis can then serve as a basis for project planning and control as well as for communication with stakeholders.

Control of the Project Environment

Analyzing the project environment is an important step in recognizing the influence of various factors on the project and controlling them accordingly. This includes, among other things:

  • Adapting project goals and content to the identified opportunities and risks from the project environment.
  • Selecting and assembling the project team, taking into account the required competencies and resources.
  • Designing the project organization and processes in coordination with the company structure and culture.
  • Involving relevant stakeholders in the project work, for example through regular communication, information exchange, and participation in decisions.
  • Continuous monitoring and adjustment of the project work to changes in the project environment, for example through regular project environment analyses and project controlling.

Successful management of the project environment thus requires careful planning, continuous monitoring, and flexible adaptation of project work to the respective conditions. Only in this way can a project be successfully led to its goal despite the multitude of influencing factors.

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What is Project Environment in Project Management?

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Project Environment

The influence of infrastructure and facility building on the physical environment is becoming more recognized and concerned. Fortunately, today's technical disciplines in charge of such work are becoming more aware of the need to mitigate the negative effects of their undertakings. The Project Manager, too, must be concerned with the project's technology and manage it properly. This is true for both the project's execution and short-term practical construction implications, as well as its conceptual development and long-term consequences.

Today's Project Manager, on the other hand, must be aware of the project's cultural, organizational, and social contexts. So, what is the project environment? Identifying project stakeholders and their potential to influence the project's success is part of comprehending what is project environment. This entails collaborating with others to produce the most outstanding outcomes, particularly in highly technical and complicated contexts like those seen in current building projects. Therefore, it is crucial that the Project Manager and the project team feel at ease in their cultural, organizational, and social environments, as well as sympathetic to them.

Consequently, there is an opportunity to positively influence the project environment, resulting in a better reception of the change that the project is intended to bring about. Some of the stakeholders, for example, will undoubtedly demonstrate their customary opposition to change. Others might have personal or organizational goals that are only tangentially tied to the project. If the challenges are accordingly identified at the early stages, be dealt with proactively, reducing the risks that might otherwise jeopardize the project's success. If you don't adopt this method, your project will almost certainly fail.

Influencing the Cultural Environment of the Project

The Project Manager of a successful project will grasp the importance of influencing the project's cultural environment for the project stakeholders' advantage. Every project team member, and indeed every member of the workforce, must be made to believe that every other project stakeholder is equally as essential as they are. It entails instilling a global attitude of "We care!" and a dedication to service, even if it is painful at times. It also entails understanding what is project environment in which every decision and action is made with the goal of improving the stakeholder experience above what it would have been if the project had not been done.

Rather than obsessing about computer printouts and weekly progress reports, it necessitates a focus on the quality of the stakeholder's experience at every level of the project. This connection replicates the Project Manager/team relationship, so it's obvious where to start. Because solid Project Management methods may be attained in the short and long term via solid team interaction, the Project Manager may develop productive connections with team members by attending to what they require in order to fulfill their different contributions. These qualities of cooperation and support as a team are eventually passed on to the project's stakeholders. This uplifting atmosphere is seldom overlooked.

When creating Project Management strategies at the start of the project, the project's executive should realize the critical role that human resources development, particularly Project Management training, may play in strengthening the project's cultural environment. Such training is an effective tool for increasing project expertise and commitment, boosting team performance, and ultimately improving project quality.

Internal Project Management Strategies That Work

There could be a multitude of causes for a project's fiasco, some of which are technical and others which are management. Even technological failures, however, are often linked back to a failure on the part of the project's senior management to identify and address these inherent managerial risks. On the other hand, it is likely that the majority of ostensibly successful enterprises do not represent their full potential.

A number of criteria have been associated with successful projects based on project experience. While these requirements do not ensure future project success, their absence may likely result in sub-optimal results, if not outright failure. The Project's Executive plays a critical part in the project's success and should insist on the following:

  • Executive Support: Through active sponsorship and control, the executive must clearly show support for the Project Management philosophy.
  • External Authority: In interacting with all partners, the Project Manager must be viewed as the authoritative representative and the sole point of official contact.
  • Internal Authority: To guarantee that his/her criteria are met, the Project Manager must have the required management authority inside the company.
  • Commitment Authority: The power and duty to govern the commitment of resources, including cash, within specified boundaries shall be given to the Project Manager. The outcomes of these judgments must be transparent and accountable.
  • All Key Decisions Should Involve the Project Manager: No significant technical, cost, scheduling, or performance-related decisions should be arrived at without the notice, knowledge, and advice of the Project Manager.
  • Project Team: The Project Manager should have a voice in the composition of the project team, as this will aid in obtaining personal dedication, support, and the appropriate level of service.
  • Management Information Systems: Information and control systems for Project Management must be in place.
  • Competence is required of the Project Manager and the team members. The project's other functional workers must likewise be competent.

External Project Environments

External occurrences on specific projects catch the Project Manager and their team off guard and are therefore seen as roadblocks to development. However, as previously said, projects are often only possible due to the external environment. Thus, the project team must know that they also are sensitive to it. 

What is the external project environment?

It comprises the project's established and cutting-edge state-of-the-art technologies, consumers and rivals, geographical, climatic, social, economic, and political surroundings, and almost anything else that might influence its success. These issues may have an impact on the Project Manager's primary tasks of planning, organizing, staffing, and directing.

This external project environment is made up of a complex web of interconnected interactions that are continually reacting to the project as it takes shape. In contrast, most projects, especially infrastructure projects, are designed to have an influence on the project environment in some manner. As a result, these interdependencies must be considered in order for the project to be successful in the end.

Even more importantly, the elements mentioned above have a tendency to change throughout the course of a project's life cycle, particularly if the project is phased in and completed over many years. As a consequence of the project environment, there is a significant level of uncertainty or risk around it. In fact, the more reliance there is, the more uncertainty there is, and the greater the task for the Project Manager and the team.

Obviously, the setting for each project will be different. In actuality, it is likely to be decided primarily by three factors: the project's product or service, the technology and the method in which it is used, and the project's geographical location.

The project team must learn to interact frequently with the individuals and institutions that make up the most essential elements of the project's external environment in order to identify potential difficulties arising from the project's stakeholders, assess their likelihood of occurrence, and try to head them off in advance. Together with the project's sponsors, owners, and users, these individuals make up the project's direct and indirect stakeholders.

Creating a Healthy Stakeholder Environment

Adopting a good stakeholder environment is similar to influencing the project's cultural environment, which was defined above as a matter of developing the proper mindset. Perhaps the simplest way to express this mindset is to flip the typical organizational chart hierarchy.

To put it another way, the project stakeholders are at the top of the chart, then the front-line project team members, and finally the Project Manager. Perhaps the project team will be better seen as a true service organization, motivated to complete the given project with absolute perfection, both in terms of perception and reality.

Learn how to understand the role of various stakeholders and how to use this information in order to enhance the way in which the information is received as well as the way in which it is perceived. Identify the true nature of each stakeholder group's business and their consequent interest in the project. Understand how motivated they are and how they behave. Assess how they may react to various approaches. Learn about Project Management's role in reacting to the project's stakeholders' motivations. Identify the main areas that will have the most influence on the project's success.

Always keep in mind that even a tiny stakeholder group might find the project's "fatal defect," which could put the project to a halt!

Identifying Project Participants

A stakeholder analysis is one method for efficiently dealing with the external project environment. The goal of such an analysis would be to first identify all prospective stakeholders who may have an effect on the project and then to assess their respective power to influence it.

Groupings of Stakeholders

Project stakeholders may be classified into one of the following categories:

  • Those who are directly involved in the project, such as input suppliers, output consumers, and Project Managers;
  • Those who have a considerable say over the various matters, including physical, social, economic, and legal situations;
  • Those who have a nexus based on a hierarchical setup to the project, such as local, regional, and national government authorities; and
  • Those individuals, groups, and associations who have an interest in the project.

Types of Stakeholders

After the different stakeholders have been identified, they may be categorized according to their respective capacity to affect the project. The stakeholders can be categorized into three types based on the nature of their personality: those who can be controlled, those who can be influenced, and those who need to be appreciated.

  Each stakeholder may then be ranked by degree of relevance based on their potential to affect the project within each area. Appropriate members of the project team may therefore prioritize their efforts in order to maintain the required stakeholder links, increasing the project's chances of success. The project team's work may be allocated to a particular group within the project team if the project is big enough or the stakeholder connections are strong enough.

Clearly, the Project Manager's role has expanded beyond directing events inside his or her own project organization. As many software products may have suggested, Project Management is no longer only the monitoring of time and expense via planning, scheduling, and resource-leveling. It also includes the Project Manager's many other organizational responsibilities as the project team's leader is insufficient.

All of these factors are critical, but they are insufficient in today's dynamic environment for effective and successful Project Management. The necessity to monitor the project's links to the external environment is as vital - and frequently more so to achieve a good project conclusion. This is particularly true for infrastructure projects that prioritize growth and innovation and must adapt to ever-faster change.

The rationale is straightforward. Every building project serves a certain function in relation to and within its surroundings. As a result, its design and execution must be sensitive to the environment, maximizing the benefits to all stakeholders as much as possible while avoiding negative consequences via conscious mitigation. Clearly, the Project Manager's performance within the broader question of “what is project environment” may make all the difference in the project's success or failure.

  • https://www.project-risk-manager.com/blog/the-importance-of-understanding-project-environment-and-context/
  • https://www.systemation.com/dont-forget-about-the-project-environment/
  • https://www.can-do.de/en/blog/project-environment-analysis-puma-how-you-correctly-raise-and-assess-expectations

Is a passionate learner and blogger on Agile, Scrum and Scaling areas. She has been following and practicing these areas for several years and now converting those experiences into useful articles for your continuous learning.

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Chapter 3. Project Initiation

3.2 Project Environment

When the business case and the project charter, and later, the project management plan and its subcomponents are prepared, the project environment surrounding the project should be examined thoroughly to delineate the factors that may have a negative or positive impact on the project activities and its outcomes. In PMBOK Guide 6th Edition, this environment is composed of enterprise environmental factors (EEFs) and organizational process assets (OPAs). PMBOK Guide 7th edition refers to them as the project environment. The project environment is composed of two components – internal and external, which are described in detail in the following sections.

3.2.1 Internal Environment

The internal environment in which a project is developed consists of the factors that are internal to the organization, but outside the project itself. These factors include elements such as organizational culture, structure, and governance as well as security and safety measures. Other tangible elements include geographic location as well as distribution of facilities and resources, infrastructure, IT software and hardware, resource availability, and employee capability. The internal environment also includes organizational process assets, which are processes, policies, and procedures as well as organizational knowledge bases (e.g., financial data, historical information, lessons learned, project files from previous projects) [1] .

Consider the project charter example above. While we are creating the business case as well as preparing the project charter and project management plans, it would be wise to incorporate all the factors that may affect the mobile app and website optimization project. We should enumerate the main properties of our grocery store chain, some of which are provided below:

  • Strategic objectives, mission, and vision
  • Organizational values and beliefs
  • Cultural norms that influence the relationships among coworkers
  • Code of conduct
  • The number of employees
  • Geographic locations and the size of the stores
  • Variety of the products and services sold
  • Financial situation

We should also take into account the organizational structure of the headquarters and all the branches. This also helps us identify internal and external stakeholders who are affected by our project and who may affect our project. Additionally, this helps us identify the dependencies among the departmental units, and also identify internal resources that might need to be utilized to complete the project. Reporting structure inside the organization could influence our project’s decision-making and change request processes. When our project needs to utilize hardware and software tools to facilitate the activities, we can obtain them in an expedited way directly from the assets of our organization, which also saves the budget. When we need resources such as human resources, materials, and equipment, since we have already delineated the organizational structure with tasks and responsibilities of each unit, we can benefit from the agreements which have already been made with approved providers and subcontractors. Another advantage of listing all the capabilities of our organizations would be when we establish the project team. If our organization employs business or systems analysts, developers, user interface designers, or testers, we can ask their managers or executive-level managers above these managers to provide these qualified employees with specialized knowledge for our project. This may also reduce the external risks that we may face if we hire them from outside our organization. We will elaborate on the organizational structure in the “Organizational Structure” section below.

3.2.2        External Environment

A project’s external environment consists of the factors that exist outside of the organization. It includes market conditions, social and cultural influences and issues, legal restrictions, commercial databases, academic research, government or industry standards, financial considerations, and physical environmental elements [2] .

Figure 3.2 illustrates types of general macro environments and forces that are interrelated and affect organizations: sociocultural, technological, economic, government and political, natural disasters, and human-induced problems that affect industries and organizations. Macro environment refers to the outermost layer of elements in a firm’s external environment that can impact a business but are generally beyond the firm’s direct control, such as the economy and political activity. This environment can also affect projects conducted by organizations. For example, economic environmental forces generally include such elements in the economy as exchange rates and wages, employment statistics, and related factors such as inflation, recessions, and other shocks—negative and positive. Additional factors include hiring and unemployment, employee benefits, factors affecting organizational operating costs, revenues, and profits, all of which are affected by global, national, regional, and local economies. Politics and governmental policies, international wars, natural disasters, technological inventions, and sociocultural forces could directly affect our organization and the projects or may interact with other forces such as economic forces.

Figure 3.2: Macro Forces and Environments (Attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC-BY 4.0 license)

Besides the macro environment as explained above and illustrated in Figure 3.2, the micro environment is another external environment element that refers to the middle layer of elements in a firm’s external environment, primarily concerned with a firm’s industry situation. Harvard strategy professor Michael Porter developed an analysis tool to evaluate a firm’s micro environment. Porter’s Five Forces is a tool used to examine different micro-environmental groups in order to understand the impact each group has on a firm in an industry (Figure 3.3). In this textbook, we will not explain each factor (See the reference link [3] ). However, these five factors, industry rivalry, the threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, supplier power, and buyer power, could have a substantial influence on a project. Therefore, we should take these external factors into account while assessing the factors that may affect our project from outside the organization.

Figure 3.3: Porter’s Five Forces Model of Industry Competition (Attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC-BY 4.0 license)

It is important to keep these external factors in mind when preparing for and managing a project since many if not most of these external factors and any changes in these factors may have negative or positive impacts on projects. They could lead to risks that may put the project activities and deliverables, and the overall project in jeopardy.

  • Project Management Institute. (2017). A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK guide) (6th ed.). Project Management Institute. ↵
  • Project Management Institute. (2021). A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK guide) (7th ed.). Project Management Institute. ↵
  • Principles of Management. (2019). Retrieved from https://openstax.org/books/principles-management/pages/8-4-a-firms-micro-environment-porters-five-forces?query=micro%20environment&target=%7B%22type%22%3A%22search%22%2C%22index%22%3A0%7D#fs-idm537041840 ↵

Project Management by Abdullah Oguz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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What Is the Project Environment?

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How stress-free would it feel if your project didn’t have competition? Or if you didn’t need to worry about funding, PR, or politics? 

Even if you took away these external factors, you’d still have to think about employee well-being or budgeting. The worries around managing a project in a complex environment are many.

Yet, all of these factors can also help your project management. Politics can control competition, and PR can boost your success with customers. 

A project cannot exist in a vacuum. Therefore, the best way to overcome your worries is to understand these factors better.

The project environment includes all factors that, directly or indirectly, externally or internally, influence your project. 

In this article, we will take a look at these factors, as well as the methods — like SWOT analysis — that will help us discern and take advantage of the factors.

What is the project environment - cover

What are the types of project environments?

Many specifics might affect your project. We call these project environment factors. 

Now, since there are plenty of these factors, we need to classify them in some way so that you can more easily analyze them. 

Usually, we distinguish between 2 project environment types, which work as groups of factors with unifying characteristics:

  • External project environment
  • Internal project environment

Type #1: External environment

The external project environment is made up of all the factors that are not under the direct control of your organization. Even though these factors exist outside your project, they can have a great influence on it. 

The external environment can further be divided into: 

  • Microenvironment 
  • Macroenvironment

Subtype #1: Microenvironment

The microenvironment includes all the external factors that have a direct influence on the project. It involves the following factors:

  • Physical distribution agencies,
  • Marketing agencies,
  • Financial institutions,
  • Competitors, and
  • The public eye.

Microenvironment factor #1: Consumers

If your project focuses on selling a product or a service, it is in a market connection with consumers. 

Your task, as a project manager, is to track the relationship between your organization and consumers in your chosen market.

project environment was

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Microenvironment factor #2: Suppliers

Suppliers are an important factor because they provide the necessary resources for your project. 

You must stay on good terms with your suppliers and find new ways to boost those relationships. Building a great working relationship with your suppliers leads to: 

  • Information on the market’s supply, 
  • Finding new ways of obtaining valuable resources, and 
  • Even reducing supply costs.

Microenvironment factor #3: Physical distribution agencies

Physical distribution agencies offer the service of storing and transporting goods. They can transport your goods by railroad, freight, etc.

For example, if your shipment is late, it can affect your deadlines, so choosing a trusted distribution agency is essential. 

Microenvironment factor #4: Marketing agencies

Marketing agencies can help increase awareness of your project through the following services: 

  • Market research, 
  • Education, 
  • Consulting, 
  • Content marketing, 
  • PPC, etc. 

Since many organizations rely on outsourced marketing services, it’s important that you hold your marketing agency of choice under strict standards and criteria.

Microenvironment factor #5: Financial institutions

Through their financial services, banks and insurance companies directly influence your project’s business transactions. Therefore, it’s crucial to foster great collaboration and cooperation with these institutions.

Microenvironment factor #6: Competitors

Competitors should be identified even before you begin with your project. You should closely monitor and study your competitors in order to gain a better position in the market by finding ways to outperform them.

Microenvironment factor #7: The public 

The public includes all market subjects that cannot be sorted into the previously mentioned groups, but still have an interest in your project. This interest can be positive, but also negative and even hostile. 

We can separate the public into the following groups:

  • The financial public — has an essential influence in obtaining financial support.
  • Media — social media, internet blogs, TV and radio stations, magazines, etc.
  • State — communication with the state government, agencies, the local government, etc.
  • People — a unique focus group of organizations and associations. For example, organizations for consumer protection or anti-smoking organizations. Depending on your project, these can greatly influence your organization.

Subtype #2: Macroenvironment

The macroenvironment includes all external factors that do not have a direct influence on your project. However, they influence the market as a whole and therefore have an indirect impact on your project management.

The macroenvironment factors are:

  • Demographic,
  • Technology,
  • Nature, and

Macroenvironment factor #1: Demographic

The demographic information usually focuses on your target demographic group. It deals with information such as: 

  • Population count, 
  • Population growth, 
  • Average age, 
  • Average income, etc.

For example, if you’re building a product, it’s important to know your target audience and their needs. If you’re making a collaborative note-taking app, you might want to target students and young professionals.

On the opposite end, if you’re making a high-end luxury product, you will want to target a more high-income demographic.

Macroenvironment factor #2: Market

Before you decide to realize your idea for a product or service, you first need to research the market and the viability of your product or service considering the current market conditions. 

Through market research, you gain insight into: 

  • Inflation rates, 
  • Income changes, 
  • Purchasing power, 
  • Purchasing habits, etc. 

For example, if inflation rates increase, the purchasing power of a populace decreases. 

Alternatively, you might need to pay attention to whether the purchasing habits of a population fit into the niche that your project is attempting to produce.

Macroenvironment factor #3: Technology

Overall improvements to a market’s technology can greatly impact and improve the way your project is executed. 

With new technology comes: 

  • Increased efficiency, 
  • Modernization, 
  • New discoveries, 
  • Materials, 
  • Products, and 
  • Markets. 

Let’s look at an example that explains why technology is an important macroenvironment factor. 

Uber didn’t invent either the phone or the internet. Yet, without that technology, they wouldn’t have been able to compete with your average taxi service.

Macroenvironment factor #4: Politics

The political environment consists of: 

  • Laws, 
  • Regulations, and 
  • Policies your project must follow. 

Laws and regulations may seem limiting at first, but they can actually work in your favor, preventing things like monopolies from forming in the market. 

They can also be restricting — a tax increase can take away financial resources from your project. 

Overall, it’s important to keep track of any changes in this department, as they might affect your project.

Macroenvironment factor #5: Nature

When you think of nature as a factor, the first thing that comes to mind is natural resources. And, if your project doesn’t have any use for them, you might wish to skip this factor in your analysis. 

Be careful though — another important part of this factor is the change in energy costs, which affects practically everyone.

Macroenvironment factor #6: Culture

While the demographic factor deals with more easily quantifiable information, culture deals with something more abstract. 

When analyzing culture, pay attention to:

  • People’s values and beliefs, 
  • Community experiences, 
  • Religious structure, etc. 

All of these can greatly affect how the target populace will react to your project.

Type #2: Internal environment

Internal environment refers to all the factors that come from within your project. Therefore, they are in your more immediate control.

Internal factor #1: Organizational culture

This is arguably one of the most important factors in your project management. It can affect things like: 

  • Employee morale, 
  • Quality standards, 
  • Product quality, 
  • Project team efficiency, etc. 

We can describe it as the cumulation of your vision, mission, objectives, and company value system, as well as the “Code of Conduct”, i.e. the way your company culture is enacted in practice. 

A toxic company culture can have a negative impact on your project team morale and engagement, hurting the entire project in the long run.

Internal factor #2: Organizational structure

Organizational structure represents the way activities are directed within an organization as well as the hierarchical outline within which your organization operates. It can influence things like:

  • Risk aversion , 
  • How tasks are delegated and executed, as well as 
  • Interpersonal employee relationships. 

It’s important to have a clearly defined structure. If not, an employee reporting progress to the wrong person can cause delays. 

Alternatively, confusion in task delegation can lead to multiple employees working on the same task.

Internal factor #3: Human resources 

Your employees are a vital part of your internal environment. They are a large part of what propels your project from idea to reality. 

To make the most of their project, project managers should track their team members’ skills, performance, and attitude toward work. 

Even things that are not directly project-related — such as, for example, a colleague who tends to start conflicts — can worsen the organizational culture and negatively influence the project outcome.

Internal factor #4: Financial resources

This factor affects your project budget and the way your budget is distributed within your project. 

The available financial resources will affect your project planning, as you need to make sure your ideas are realistic within the budget constraints .

Internal factor #5: Tangible assets

Tangible assets are physical resources that your organization owns. This can be anything from office desks and computers to the office building itself. 

Having a detailed knowledge of your physical assets will allow you to use them for your project most effectively. 

For example, if you have a limited amount of necessary machinery, you must take that into account while planning out your project. 

Internal factor #6: Project management software

We mentioned earlier that advances in technology could improve the way projects are executed. One of the biggest improvements brought to us this way is project management software. 

With free project management apps like Plaky , tracking your project progress and overall task management has never been easier.

Much like spreadsheets replaced pin-up boards, PM software is quickly replacing spreadsheets. The right project management software can improve your efficiency, help your team stay on track, and allow you to have all the information you need in one place.

project environment was

Track your progress and achieve better project results with Plaky.

What is a project environment analysis?

Project environment analysis is a way of translating all the information you’ve gathered about your project environment factors and turning it into a strategy that will take your project’s results to greater heights.

It’s not guaranteed that all of the mentioned project management factors will influence your work. However, through careful analysis, you can discern the ones that are most likely to affect your project.

Project environment analysis methods 

The task of a project environment analysis is to determine a project’s potential and enable its adaptation in an ever-changing environment. 

There are plenty of methods to conduct a project environment analysis that have been tried and tested over time. Here, we’ve listed 5 of the most popular ones:

  • SWOT analysis,
  • PEST analysis,
  • Porter’s value chain,
  • Porter’s five forces, and
  • Stakeholder analysis.

We’ll briefly go over each of them.

Method #1: SWOT analysis

This method focuses on analyzing both the internal and external environment of your project. The SWOT analysis is used to get an idea of where your project stands in its environment and what strategies you should implement in the future based on these insights. 

SWOT is an acronym that stands for the most important internal and external factors that influence your project, i.e. your project’s: 

  • S trengths, 
  • W eaknesses, 
  • O pportunities, and 

Identifying your project’s strengths & weaknesses

Project strengths and weaknesses belong to the internal project environment factors. 

To determine the strengths and weaknesses of your project there are 2 questions to ask yourself: 

  • What are the properties of your project that make it stand out from the competition?
  • What are the unfavorable circumstances and limitations within the project?

For example, producing almond milk has the strength of being able to use the leftover dried parts for sweet cake production. 

Alternatively, a weakness could be a lack of funding for that project.

Identifying your project’s opportunities & threats

Conversely, opportunities and threats are external project environment factors. To determine what exactly they are, we may ask the following questions:

  • What are the opportunities and positive effects that the external project environment offers us? 
  • What are the outside dangers and threats to our project? 

For example, things like the launching of a new technology can be seen as an opportunity, and competitors creating a monopoly on the market would be seen as a threat. 

The SWOT matrix in Plaky

Method #2: PEST analysis

The PEST analysis is a project environment analysis focused on the essential external environment factors. 

The acronym itself stands for these 4 factors, which we explored in more depth earlier in the article:

  • P olitics, 
  • E conomy, 
  • S ociety, and
  • T echnology.

Garnering a better understanding of your external environment will help you position yourself in the market correctly. 

As another benefit, improving relationships with these factors will always benefit you in the long run, opening new avenues and opportunities.

Method #3: Porter’s value chain 

In contrast to PEST, you can use Porter’s value chain for internal environment analysis. 

It’s an analysis of the possible activities and processes within your project, with the intention of increasing overall efficiency. 

Porter’s value chain separates all activities in a project into two categories: 

  • Primary and 
  • Support activities.

Primary activities in the Porter’s value chain

Primary activities are those that directly relate to creating, selling, maintaining, and supporting your project’s product or service. 

They include: 

  • Inbound logistics, 
  • Operations, 
  • Outbound logistics, 
  • Marketing and sales, and 

Secondary activities in the Porter’s value chain

The function of the secondary activities is to support the primary activities. 

Secondary activities are: 

  • Procurement and purchasing, 
  • Human resource management, 
  • Technology development, and 
  • Company infrastructure. 

Having a better understanding of the intricacies of your project’s activities gives way to more creative improvement tactics. 

Seeing how activities interact with each other and how to better delegate cooperation between them can yield fantastic results.

Method #4: Porter’s five forces

When thinking of moving your project into a new environment, you can use Porter’s five forces analysis to calculate the competitive environment. 

Let’s take a look at the 5 forces that determine this and the main questions you should ask when analyzing them:

  • The threat of new entry — How easy is it for new projects to enter this market?
  • Buyer’s bargaining power — How easy is it for buyers to switch to competitors?
  • Supplier’s bargaining power — How difficult is it for you to switch suppliers?
  • The threat of substitution — How easy is it to find a replacement for what you offer?
  • Competitive rivalry — How many competitors do you have, and how strong are they?

Answering these questions brings an avalanche of conclusions that will tell you if a competitive environment is worth entering or not. 

For example, if it is difficult for you to switch suppliers, supplier power is high. Because of this, suppliers can easily and unpredictably change their prices or the quality of their products or services. This is not an environment worth entering.

On the other hand, if you offer a product or service that is difficult to replace, you will have a low threat of substitution. This means it is difficult for buyers to divert from what you offer and makes this an attractive environment to enter.

Method #5: Stakeholder analysis

Stakeholders are any individuals, groups, or organizations that have an interest in the realization of your project, and can exert influence over it. As the name suggests, they “hold the stakes” to your project and its success.

We can separate project stakeholders into 2 main categories, based on where they stand in our project environment factors — they can be internal and external. 

Internal stakeholders are: 

  • Shareholders, 
  • Managers, 
  • Project managers, and 
  • The project team . 

External stakeholders are: 

  • Business partners, 
  • Clients, 
  • Suppliers, 
  • The government, etc.

Stakeholder analysis is done in five steps:

  • Identify and classify stakeholders.
  • Analyze and infer specific stakeholders’ interests.
  • Analyze and infer specific stakeholders’ possible influence.
  • Define priority stakeholders with the greatest influence.
  • Find a way of gaining support from the priority stakeholders.

Prioritizing support from stakeholders with the greatest influence on your project is the most efficient way of gaining better results. 

Conclusion: Being aware of your project environment improves your chances of success

As mentioned, you can’t escape your project environment, so it’s always best to understand it. Whether you use one of the mentioned methods or try to improvise your own, the underlying concepts stay the same. 

If you want to become more aware of your project environment and understand how it affects your project, we encourage you to try some of the methods we listed.

Go through the project environment analysis methods, and see how different ones bring different advantages. You could analyze an existing project you are familiar with.

Just like with everything else, in project management, practice makes perfect.

✉️ Has this post helped you understand the project environment? Have you analyzed a project environment before? Let us know at [email protected] , and we may include your answers in this or future posts. If you liked this blog post and found it useful, share it with someone you think would also benefit from it.

LukaBogavac

Luka Bogavac is a project management author and researcher who focuses on making project management topics both approachable and informative. With experience in entrepreneurial projects, education, and writing, he aims to make articles that his younger self would appreciate. In his free time, he enjoys being outdoors hiking, or staying indoors with a good film or video game.

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1.2 Organizational Environment and the Project Environment

Organizational environment.

Executives select projects based on their potential value to their organization. Prioritizing projects in any organization depends on a number of factors such as strategy, economics, social, political situation, technology, competition and other environmental factors. The PMI Standard for Organizational Project Management (OPM, 2018), provides a framework by which organizations can achieve their strategic objectives by means of a portfolio, program and project management.

Selecting and prioritizing projects has to be aligned with the goals, values and strategy of the organization. For example if a core value of an organization is “customer focus” or “customer centered” then the activities selected for requirements, features and scope validation must reflect customer-focus approaches to create value for the stakeholders. This aligns with the idea of efficiently engaging with stakeholders to meet their expectation and optimize the value delivered.

Organization environment represents the organization governance, policies, organizational culture and supporting practices of the organization that are created to support OPM and organizational strategy delivery and the system must be set up for value delivery.

project environment was

Adapting to the unique objectives, stakeholders, and complexity of the organization environment contributes to project success or failures. The PMBOK 7th edition discusses ‘tailoring’ which is the deliberate adaptation of approach, governance, and processes to make them more suitable for the given environment and the work at hand.  Tailoring involves understanding the project context, goals and operating environment. It encourages project leaders to tailor their approach to the challenge that they are tackling, the work that they are doing, the team that they are engaged with and the context within which they are working.

Effective project management and execution start with choosing the right projects. While you might not have control over which projects your organization pursues, you do need to understand why your organization chooses to invest in particular projects so that you can effectively manage your projects and contribute to decisions about how to develop and, if necessary, terminate a project. It is important to start with the definitions:

Product: Is an artifact that is produced, is quantifiable, and can be either an end item in itself or a component item.

Project: A temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result.

Program: Related projects, subsidiary programs, and program activities that are managed in a coordinated manner to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually.

Portfolio: Projects, programs, subsidiary portfolios, and operations managed as a group to achieve strategic objectives.

project environment was

It is important to understand the similarities and differences amongst portfolio, program and projects since the management of portfolios, programs and projects are driven by organization strategies. However, they interact at different levels to achieve strategic goals and objectives.

project environment was

Projects are best if there is one primary goal for the project to focus on delivering; multiple goals are best dealt with by way of a program, with a series of projects each focusing on a particular goal.

It is also important to understand the concept of ‘product’ – which is an artifact that is produced, is quantifiable and can be either an end item in itself or a component item. Product management may initiate programs or projects at any point in the product life cycle to create or enhance specific components, functions or capabilities. Product management is a separate discipline with its own body of knowledge representing key integration point within the program management and project management disciplines.

The value delivery system is a new concept introduced in the standards section of the PMBOK 7th edition. Being very successful in completing a project does not always mean that organization’s strategies also achieve success. You may have produced more than one product as a result of successive successful projects, but this does not mean that you added value to the company.

According to the value delivery system, the strategies, goals, and tasks that an organization decides, drives the portfolio, programs, and projects that are carried out by the organization. These must be considered holistic, reviewed, and aimed at adding value to the organization.

The results of completed projects are evaluated, measured and analyzed to determine whether the expected impact has occurred. According to the results of this analysis, the portfolios owned by the organization are updated to create the highest value for the organization.

As long as the product or delivery included in the scope of the project was produced, the question of whether the targeted value was achieved remained somewhat ambiguous. In every project a benefits realization happens in the short term or long term. In a value management system, this benefits realization should be measured precisely and important value decisions should be taken according to feedbacks from operations, projects results, programs, and portfolios. In order to be able to do this, we have to build feedback loops into the system. Feedback is collected at the end of every project and these are used for value decisions at the portfolio level.

Project Environment

Project leaders who are able to effectively understand the environment in which they are operating can not only refine their approach to tailoring the tools and techniques required, they can also significantly increase the likelihood of successfully delivering change.

There are many factors that need to be understood within a project environment this can be classified as internal and external factors.

Internal factors can arise from the organization itself, a portfolio, a program, another project or a combination of these.

External factors can enhance, constrain, or have a neutral influence on project outcomes. See examples:

The cultural and social environments consider people, demographics, and education. It is about understanding the cultural differences of unique countries and the impact that local and national governments have on organizations. The physical environment is about working conditions and locations. Delivering a project that has global impacts is much more challenging than delivering a project that only impacts the local environment.

Of all the factors, the physical ones are the easiest to understand, and it is the cultural and global factors that are often misunderstood or ignored. How we deal with clients, customers, or project members from other countries can be critical to the success of the project. For example, North American cultures value accomplishments and individualism, and tend to be more informal, calling each other by first names, even if having just met. Europeans tend to be more formal, using surnames instead of first names in a business setting, even if they know each other well. In addition, their communication style is more formal than in the North American setting, and while they tend to value individualism, they also value history, hierarchy, and loyalty.

How a product is received can be very dependent on international cultural differences. For example, in the 1990s, when many large American and European telecommunications companies were cultivating new markets in Asia, their customers’ cultural differences often produced unexpected situations. Western companies planned their telephone systems to work the same way in Asia, as they did in Europe and the United States. But the protocol of conversation was different. Call-waiting, a popular feature in the West, is considered impolite in some parts of Asia. This cultural blunder could have been avoided had the team captured the project environment requirements and involved the customer.

Project leaders in multicultural projects must appreciate the cultural dimensions and try to learn relevant customs, courtesies, and business protocols before taking responsibility for managing an international project. A project leader must take into consideration these various cultural influences and how they may affect the project’s completion, schedule, scope, and cost.

Other key consideration in understanding project environments – include operational and project management processes, policies, procedures, success metrics, and knowledge repositories. The degree to which they are utilized in a project, as well as the expectations surrounding their use, have a big impact on how projects are delivered.

Managing Project Costs, Risks, Quality and Procurement Copyright © by Florence Daddey. All Rights Reserved.

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Project Management for the Creation of Organisational Value pp 85–133 Cite as

The Project Environment

  • Ofer Zwikael 3 &
  • John Smyrk 3  

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All processes, and the work they involve, have a context. In Chap. 2 we introduced two distinct contexts for work: the project environment and the operational environment. In this chapter we examine the project environment from four perspectives: chronology (a sequence of phases), structure (a taxonomy of components), organisation (a model of governance) and engagement (management of stakeholders). In our discussion of structure, we draw an important distinction between deliverables-related activity and management-related activity. Although the overwhelming bulk of work arising from a project is “below-the-line” (required to produce, deliver and implement the deliverables identified in the scoping statement), the project environment is shaped by the demands of “above-the-line” work (required to plan and manage the project). To accommodate these demands, we define, describe and apply a general model, regardless of the nature of the project. The peculiarities of particular projects can be accommodated by adapting this common model.

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Project environment analysis - How to correctly collect and assess expectations

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A project environment analysis (PUMA) provides you with an overview of expectations and opportunities for the upcoming project. It is therefore an indispensable prerequisite for the success of your project.

What is the project environment analysis?

PUMA assesses the entire environment of a project, i.e. all influencing factors that are relevant for the success of the project. Influencing factors include, for example:

  • project management and the individual project teams,
  • the client and his interests,
  • the project risks and the measures to control them,
  • competitors, public authorities and works councils with their            interests and regulations as well as
  • other persons directly or indirectly affected by the project.

PUMA thus answers the fundamental question: Can the project objective be achieved and how likely is its success?

Why is it important to raise expectations and opportunities before the project starts?

If the set project goal can be achieved with a high probability, PUMA provides you with the basis for the subsequent project structuring.

Therein then:

  • takes into account the opportunities, risks and expectations of the project,
  • determined the correct procedure and
  • taken the necessary measures,

in order to be able to complete the project accurately.

Therefore, you should perform the project environment analysis before the project starts.

What are the project environment analysis advantages?

PUMA offers you significant advantages both before and after the project start.

The main benefits before starting a project are:

  • obtain the necessary overview of the important influencing factors,
  • identify the upcoming changes in the industry environment,
  • recognize the current and future opportunities and risks,
  • discover challenges based on technological forecasts,
  • develop the right project strategy based on the information gathered.

After the project start, PUMA helps you to adjust the course of your project as needed. This is made possible by the fact that the environment analysis significantly improves your understanding of the market and thus makes it easy for you to keep an eye on the market situation.

What are the most important project environment analysis criteria?

There are some criteria for the PUMA that you should consider.

These are especially:

  • The political factors such as tax policy, pending legislative changes or trade reforms.
  • The economic factors such as the existing budget, taxes due, interest rates and the current inflation rate.
  • The cultural factors such as societal attitudes toward certain issues, population demographics, or mobility.
  • The technological factors such as the new technologies, the technical limitations or the current developments in research.
  • The legal factors such as the labor regulations, the regulatory framework or the health and safety laws.
  • The environmental factors such as geographical location, weather conditions or the likelihood of natural disasters.

As project environment analysis examples of cultural and environmental factors would be especially the cases where the projects are planned in distant foreign countries. This is because it is precisely there that not only the legal situation and technological progress are important, but often also the prevailing mentality of the people. This also includes local customs, which are not infrequently related to the climatic situation.

Die wichtigsten Projektumfeldanalyse Kriterien

What are the project environment analysis methods?

There are a number of ways to gather the necessary information for a comprehensive and reliable PUMA.

The main ones are:

The evaluation of information

The information can come to you in both oral and written form. The oral information comes through the broadcasters, from the employees or even from other people in the business environment. Written information is information that you obtain from people, authorities or institutions in written form. These are more reliable than the oral sources, because misunderstandings and misinterpretations can be excluded.

The market analysis

Analysis is about identifying emerging trends and challenges in a timely manner. You can use surveys for this purpose. It is also possible to observe purchasing behavior.

The forecasts

Forecasting is the estimation of future events based on observations, surveys, brainstorming, or time series analysis. Forecasts do not always come true. However, they give you insight into the probability of an event occurring. The best use for this is risk estimation.

How is project environment analysis handled at Can Do?

The PUMA can only be as safe and reliable as the information and analysis methods on which it is based. Therefore, it is advisable for you to rely on modern software and an experienced partner who is well versed in the field.

With Can Do's project environment analysis tools, you get project management software that gives you a clear, complete overview of the opportunities and risks of your upcoming project. This allows you to correctly assess and manage expectations from the outset.

The project environment analysis is an important basis for a good project start. The risk analysis methods enable you to plan your project strategically, equip it for agile project management and thus bring it safely to success.

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UpLink helps communities across the world face the threats of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. Image:  Unsplash/Noah Buscher

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Digital crowdsourcing platform UpLink was created to address such challenges and help speed up the delivery of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

Unveiled at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2020, the platform - launched with founding partners Deloitte and Salesforce - connects the next generation of change-makers and social entrepreneurs to networks of contacts with the resources, expertise and experience to help bring about change.

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Slash-and-burn farming is the only source of income for millions of farmers but it’s devastating the world’s rainforests. This is something that the UK-based Inga Foundation wants to counter through its Inga Alley farming method, which helps farmers build long-term food security on one plot of land.

Social Justice Challenge

Global platform citiesRise seeks to transform mental health policy and practice for young people across the world through its Mental Health and Friendly Cities framework – something that is only likely to become even more relevant in the COVID-19 era.

Philippines-based telerehabilitation platform TheraWee aims to improve access to rehabilitation services for children with difficulties by connecting their parents with individuals, groups and communities that can offer them support.

Noora Health

US start-up Noora Health provides families with medical skills training to help look after their loved ones, both in health facilities and at home. Its Care Companion Program has already reached more than 1 million relatives in India and Bangladesh .

Family Mask’s #PPEforAll

Global Citizen Capital and its company Family Mask’s #PPEforAll initiative was set up to boost access to affordable personal protective equipment (PPE) as the pandemic hit. By July 2020, more than 1 million masks had been distributed to elderly people across the world.

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Back to Basics (Part 9): Project Environment Analysis with PESTLE

Back to Basics (9): Project Environment Analysis with PESTLE

A project is always part of a larger project environment, which makes managing projects so challenging. A tool that helps project managers identify these threats, as well as opportunities, is the PESTLE analysis. 

A project does not exist in a vacuum but is always dependent on various internal and external factors that can threaten its successful completion. Project managers need to take into account factors such as the political, social and economic environment which can affect a project’s outcome. Understanding the external forces that have an effect on the project means that project managers can make more strategic decisions and steer the project into the right direction.

The PESTLE analysis

PESTLE is an acronym for the various factors which surround a project’s environment: 

PESTLE Factors: Political, Economical, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental

The analysis is also known as PESTEL or PEST, depending on how many environmental factors are included. This method takes a big picture or birds view approach, which means that it looks at the project in a wider context and takes into account how changes in the project’s environment affect the project. This enables project teams to anticipate changes and include these changes into their planning instead of being surprised by them.

The elements of PESTLE

Political factors you have to consider:.

  • Tax policies and other government policies
  • Trade reforms

Example: If you’re working on an international project which spans across several countries, you will have to keep in mind that different countries have different rules and regulations. Some countries have stricter regulations than others, especially when it comes to health and safety issues.

Economical factors you have to consider:

  • Budget availability
  • Import and export taxes
  • Interest rates
  • Economic growth or recession
  • Inflation rate
  • Exchange rate
  • Minimum wage

Example: If your supplier is located in another country and the exchange rate between the two countries changes, it means that your costs might increase. If the exchange rate is in your favor, you could save money on supplies.

Social factors you have to consider:

  • Cultural norms and expectations
  • Population demographics (age, gender, mobility etc.)
  • Population’s general attitude towards certain issues (health, environment, etc.)

Example: If you are planning on building an additional landing strip for an airport, you have to take the local population, who will be affected by the construction, into account. Because in order to build it, the people living there will have to relocate and people living close to the airfield will have to expect increased noise from the arriving and departing airplanes. You have to devise a strategy to address these concerns.

Technological factors you have to consider:

  • New technologies that replace older technologies
  • Technical constraints
  • Research and development

Example: A new technology or a technological shift could speed up your project’s progress, which also means that you could decrease your project costs.

Legal factors you have to consider:

  • Employment law
  • Health and safety laws
  • Regulatory frameworks

Example: Before you can start a construction project, you will have to get a building permit and have to make sure that the construction plan is in accordance to regulations.

Environmental factors you have to consider:

  • Climate and weather conditions
  • Geographical location
  • Natural disasters

Example: A great example of taking environmental factors into account is the construction of Macchu Picchu , which was built 7,000 feet above sea level on a mountain ridge in the Peruvian Andes. The geographical location alone makes for an extremely difficult construction, but the climate was just as challenging because of heavy rainfall as well as the danger of earthquakes. Because the Incas knew of these environmental obstacles, they could adapt to them: They built the buildings as terraces which perfectly adapt to the steep incline of the mountain and used locally mined stones that fit together perfectly and are sturdy even without mortar.

Conducting a PESTLE analysis

The steps of a PESTLE analysis are very similar to that of a risk analysis :

The project manager and the project team should get together in a meeting or a workshop setting to come up with all the possible (and impossible) factors that could affect the project. This step is very important because the more threats and opportunities you identify, the better you can plan your project.

Sort and prioritize

The next step is to sort the factors you have identified into the different PESTLE categories and then sort them by relevance, i.e. importance. Which factors will have the biggest or the least impact on the project?

Determine probability

Now determine which factors have the highest probability of occurring. You should not just concentrate on factors that have a high probability, but should also make plans for threats that have a low probability of occurring. This ensures that you are ready for any possible scenario (see Scenario Planning ).

Create action plan

Now that you have completed steps 1-3, you can create an action plan that takes all the factors into account. The action plan should include measures to eliminate or mitigate threats that could cause your project to go off track. 

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Also read other articles of this series:

1. Effective Project Sponsorship

2. Project Manager versus Subject Matter Expert

3. Kick-Start Your Projects with the 5Ws and 2Hs

4.   Use Earned Value Management to Measure Success

5.   How to Keep Project Stakeholders Happy

6. The Project Management Life Cycle Model – A Roadmap to Success

7. The Different Project Management Office (PMO) Types

8. Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Project Planning

10. How to Create a Project Network Diagram

11. How to Create a Phase-Milestone Plan

12. What You Need to Create a Meaningful Project Status Report

13. How to plan your projects backwards

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  • How to capture lessons learned in proje ...

How to capture lessons learned in project management

Julia Martins contributor headshot

By accurately documenting the lessons learned during your project lifecycle, you can learn from your mistakes and share those findings with other project managers. This article walks you through the five steps of lessons learned: Identify, Document, Analyze, Store, and Retrieve. Learn how to conduct a lessons learned survey and brainstorming session, as well as how to share that information with other project managers. 

Project deliverables aren’t the only valuable things you can take away from a project. Whether your initiative is a resounding success, an unfortunate failure, or somewhere in between, there are always lessons to be learned from any project. 

Effectively capturing and documenting the lessons learned, however, can be tricky. In this article, we’ll walk you through how to conduct and capture lessons learned in project management. Here’s how. 

What are lessons learned in project management? 

You learn something new on every project, but a lessons learned session ensures you capture and codify that information to share it with other teams. When you conduct lessons learned and create a lessons learned report, you’re producing a document the entire project team can use to improve future projects. 

You can capture lessons learned at any point during the project timeline . In fact, depending on the complexity of the project, you may want to conduct a lessons learned session at the end of each project management phase , in order to capture information when it’s still fresh. That way, you can evaluate what went well, what went wrong, and what you can learn from it. 

Different types of lessons learned sessions

You may have conducted a lessons learned by a different name. Engineering teams often do a version of lessons learned called the 5 Whys , which specifically aims to identify the root cause of project failure. Scrum teams run retrospectives at the end of a sprint session. Some project teams also do postmortems at the end of projects. 

The important thing is to capture the information and share it with everyone. No matter what you call it, aim to conduct at least one lessons learned session per project.

5 steps to conduct a lessons learned

If you’re just getting started with lessons learned, use these five steps to ensure you’re accurately capturing, documenting, and sharing the project’s information in a way that everyone can access. 

1. Identify

This is where you identify lessons learned from the project to document in step two. The Identify phase is made up of three steps: 

Step 1: Send lessons learned survey

Immediately after the project is completed—or at the end of a significant project phase for larger initiatives—send a lessons learned survey to every project team member. This way, you’re capturing feedback while it’s still fresh in everyone’s mind. Then, aggregate that information to get a general picture of what everyone learned from the project. 

The lessons learned survey is one of the most important parts of the lessons learned process. Below, we have a template you can use. This survey is typically general to any project, though you can adapt the questions to suit your project’s needs. 

Step 2: Schedule the lessons learned session

Before the lessons learned session, select a session facilitator. Ideally, find a facilitator who isn’t the project manager, so team members feel comfortable speaking freely. Ask the team lead or an adjacent team member to run the session. 

After scheduling the lessons learned session, the facilitator shares any pre-reading information to make sure project team members are on this same page. This could include re-sharing project planning documentation like the project plan or project objectives . Depending on the complexity of the project, you could also share a timeline of the project and accomplishments. 

Step 3: Conduct the lessons learned

In addition to the lessons learned survey, host a live brainstorming session for all team members. This is a chance for team members to expand upon their lessons learned. In particular, there are three main questions to ask during the lessons learned brainstorming session: 

What went right? 

What went wrong? 

What could be improved? 

2. Document

The main point of running a lessons learned session is to share these lessons with the entire team. Plan to create a detailed lessons learned report with all of the project information and discussion notes, as well as an executive summary of the lessons learned for relevant project stakeholders to review. 

Format of a lessons learned report

Executive summary

Summary of findings

Lessons learned survey(s)

Recommendations in detail

Analyze and apply the lessons learned so other teams and future projects can benefit from it. This is especially relevant if you’re conducting a lessons learned session mid-project. Analyze the information from the lessons learned survey in order to effectively improve your project for the upcoming phases. Alternatively, if you’re running a lessons learned at the end of a project, use the Analyze phase to glean insights and opportunities before beginning your next project. 

Store the lessons learned in a central repository that everyone can access, like a project management tool. With a central source of truth, as project leads can access shared information to best prepare for their projects. 

5. Retrieve 

If you’re running a similar project, search for a lessons learned report from a past project to avoid making the same mistakes from a previous project. These reports should be shared in a central source of truth that all project managers can review before beginning the project planning process. 

Use a lessons learned survey template

During the first phase of a lessons learned session, send out a lessons learned survey to capture information from the project team. Though you will also discuss the project in person, the lessons learned survey is a critical part of ensuring you capture accurate information in order to learn from your projects. 

Here’s an example of a generic lessons learned survey template you can use for any project.

Please indicate your level of agreement or disagreement with each of the following statements: 

If you select Disagree or Strongly Disagree, please provide additional information to help improve our future project planning process. 

Project planning

The project plan included the correct level of detail. I had everything I needed to understand what the project was about. 

Strongly agree

Strongly disagree 

Not applicable

The project plan clearly explained the purpose of the project. 

The project’s scope was well defined. 

The project schedule was clear and easy to follow. 

The project communication plan clearly defined how and where I should communicate about project work. 

The project plan was shared with all stakeholders and easy to find. 

As a stakeholder, I’m happy with my level of involvement in the project planning process. 

Project execution

I understood everyone’s responsibilities during the project lifecycle.

Project stakeholders were engaged and effectively involved in the project work.

The project environment was collaborative. 

The project manager was available and responsive. 

Project changes were manageable and fit within the project scope.

The initial project schedule, documented in the project plan, closely matched the actual project schedule. 

The project outcome matched what was defined in the original project charter. 

The project team had a shared understanding of their goals and individual responsibilities. 

The project was realistic and achievable. 

Assignments were clearly defined throughout the project lifecycle. 

The project had strong performance metrics to help define success. 

I believe we hit the project goal. 

My involvement in the project—including workload, time, and effort—met my expectations. 

Lesson learned

Capturing lessons learned can help you identify and pass on institutional knowledge. Instead of reinventing the wheel, team members and project leaders have clear insight into what worked, what didn’t, and what can be improved. 

By connecting past lessons learned to future team’s work, you can start your project on the right foot. When everyone knows exactly who’s doing what by when, what happened—and why—your team is more empowered to get their high-impact work done. 

The Project Environment

The project environment artifacts evolve through three discrete states: the prototyping environment, the development environment, and the maintenance environment.

1. The prototyping environment includes an architecture testbed for prototyping project architectures to evaluate trade-offs during the inception and elaboration phases of the life cycle. This informal configuration of tools should be capable of supporting the following activities:

• Performance trade-offs and technical risk analyses

• Make/buy trade-offs and feasibility studies for commercial products

• Fault tolerance/dynamic reconfiguration trade-offs

• Analysis of the risks associated with transitioning to full-scale implementation

• Development of test scenarios, tools, and instrumentation suitable for analyzing the requirements

2. The development environment should include a full suite of development tools needed to support the various process workflows and to support round-trip engineering to the maximum extent possible.

3. The maintenance environment should typically coincide with a mature version of the development environment. In some cases, the maintenance environment may be a subset of the development environment delivered as one of the project's end products.

The transition to a mature software process introduces new challenges and opportunities for management control of concurrent activities and for assessment of tangible progress and quality. Real-world project experience has shown that a highly integrated environment is necessary both to facilitate and to enforce management control of the process. Toward this end, there are four important environment disciplines that are critical to the management context and the success of a modern iterative development process:

1. Tools must be integrated to maintain consistency and traceability. Round-trip engineering is the term used to describe this key requirement for environments that support iterative development.

2. Change management must be automated and enforced to manage multiple iterations and to enable change freedom. Change is the fundamental primitive of iterative development.

3. Organizational infrastructures enable project environments to be derived from a common base of processes and tools. A common infrastructure promotes interproject consistency, reuse of training, reuse of lessons learned, and other strategic improvements to the organization's metaprocess.

4. Extending automation support for stakeholder environments enables further support for paperless exchange of information and more effective review of engineering artifacts.

12.2.1 Round-Trip Engineering

As the software industry moves into maintaining different information sets for the engineering artifacts, more automation support is needed to ensure efficient and error-free transition of data from one artifact to another. Round-trip engineering is the environment support necessary to maintain consistency among the engineering artifacts.

Figure 12-2 depicts some important transitions between information repositories. The automated translation of design models to source code (both forward and reverse engineering) is fairly well established. The automated translation of design models to process (distribution) models is also becoming straightforward through technologies such as ActiveX and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA).

Compilers and linkers have long provided automation of source code into executable code. As architectures start using heterogeneous components, platforms, and languages, the complexity of building, controlling, and maintaining large-scale webs of components introduces new needs for configuration control and automation of build management. However, today's environments do not support automation to the greatest extent possible. For example, automated test case construction from use case and scenario descriptions has not yet evolved to support anything except the most trivial examples, such as unit test scenarios.

The primary reason for round-trip engineering is to allow freedom in changing software engineering data sources. This configuration control of all the technical

Automated production -►

Traceability links

Forward engineering (source generation from models) Reverse engineering (models generation from source)

project environment was

Figure 12-2. Round-trip engineering artifacts is crucial to maintaining a consistent and error-free representation of the evolving product. It is not necessary, however, to have bi-directional transitions in all cases. For example, although we should be able to construct test cases for scenarios defined for a given logical set of objects, we cannot "reverse engineer" the objects solely from the test cases. Similarly, reverse engineering of poorly constructed legacy source code into an object-oriented design model may be counterproductive.

Translation from one data source to another may not provide 100% completeness. For example, translating design models into C++ source code may provide only the structural and declarative aspects of the source code representation. The code components may still need to be fleshed out with the specifics of certain object attributes or methods.

12.2.2 Change Management

Change management is as critical to iterative processes as planning. Tracking changes in the technical artifacts is crucial to understanding the true technical progress trends and quality trends toward delivering an acceptable end product or interim release. In conventional software management processes, baseline configuration management techniques for technical artifacts were predominantly a late life-cycle activity. In a modern process—in which requirements, design, and implementation set artifacts are captured in rigorous notations early in the life cycle and are evolved through multiple generations—change management has become fundamental to all phases and almost all activities.

Software Change Orders

The atomic unit of software work that is authorized to create, modify, or obsolesce components within a configuration baseline is called a software change order (SCO). Software change orders are a key mechanism for partitioning, allocating, and scheduling software work against an established software baseline and for assessing progress and quality. The example SCO shown in Figure 12-3 is a good starting point for describing a set of change primitives. It shows the level of detail required to achieve the metrics and change management rigor necessary for a modern software process. By automating data entry and maintaining change records on-line, the change management bureaucracy associated with metrics reporting activities can also be automated.

The level at which an SCO is written is always an issue. What is a discrete change? Is it a change to a program unit or to a component, a file, or a subsystem? Is it a new feature, a defect resolution, or a performance enhancement? Within most projects, the atomic unit of the SCO tends to be easily accepted. In general, an SCO should be written against a single component so that it is easily allocated to a single individual. If resolution requires two people on two different teams, two discrete SCOs should be written.

The basic fields of the SCO are title, description, metrics, resolution, assessment, and disposition.

• Title. The title is suggested by the originator and is finalized upon acceptance by the configuration control board (CCB). This field should include a reference to an external software problem report if the change was initiated by an external person (such as a user).

• Description. The problem description includes the name of the originator, date of origination, CCB-assigned SCO identifier, and relevant version identifiers of related support software. The textual problem description should provide as much detail as possible, along with attached code excerpts, display snapshots, error messages, and any other data that may help to isolate the problem or describe the change needed.

• Metrics. The metrics collected for each SCO are important for planning, for scheduling, and for assessing quality improvement. Change categories are type 0 (critical bug), type 1 (bug), type 2 (enhancement), type 3 (new feature), and type 4 (other), as described later in this section. Upon acceptance of the SCO, initial estimates are made of the amount of breakage and the effort required to resolve the problem. The breakage item quantifies the

Image Primitive Software Management

volume of change, and the rework item quantifies the complexity of change. Upon resolution, the actual breakage is noted, and the actual rework effort is further elaborated. The analysis item identifies the number of staff hours expended in understanding the required change (re-creating, isolating, and debugging the problem if the change is type 0 or 1; analysis and prototyping alternative solutions if it is type 2 or 3). The implement item identifies the staff hours necessary to design and implement the resolution. The test item identifies the hours expended in testing the resolution, and the document item identifies all effort expended in updating other artifacts such as the user manual or release description. Breakage quantifies the extent of change and can be defined in units of SLOC, function points, files, components, or classes. In the case of SLOC, a source file comparison program that quantifies differences may provide a simple estimate of breakage. In general, the precision of breakage numbers is relatively unimportant. Changes between 0 and 100 lines should be accurate to the nearest 10, changes between 100 and 1,000 to the nearest 100, and so forth.

• Resolution. This field includes the name of the person responsible for implementing the change, the components changed, the actual metrics, and a description of the change. Although the level of component fidelity with which a project tracks change references can be tailored, in general, the lowest level of component references should be kept at approximately the level of allocation to an individual. For example, a "component" that is allocated to a team is not a sufficiently detailed reference.

• Assessment. This field describes the assessment technique as either inspection, analysis, demonstration, or test. Where applicable, it should also reference all existing test cases and new test cases executed, and it should identify all different test configurations, such as platforms, topologies, and compilers.

• Disposition. The SCO is assigned one of the following states by the CCB:

• Proposed: written, pending CCB review

• Accepted: CCB-approved for resolution

• Rejected: closed, with rationale, such as not a problem, duplicate, obsolete change, resolved by another SCO

• Archived: accepted but postponed until a later release

• In progress: assigned and actively being resolved by the development organization

• In assessment: resolved by the development organization; being assessed by a test organization

• Closed: completely resolved, with the concurrence of all CCB members

A priority and release identifier can also be assigned by the CCB to guide the prioritization and organization of concurrent development activities.

Configuration Baseline

A configuration baseline is a named collection of software components and supporting documentation that is subject to change management and is upgraded, maintained, tested, statused, and obsolesced as a unit. With complex configuration management systems, there are many desirable project-specific and domain-specific standards.

There are generally two classes of baselines: external product releases and internal testing releases. A configuration baseline is a named collection of components that is treated as a unit. It is controlled formally because it is a packaged exchange between groups. For example, the development organization may release a configuration baseline to the test organization or even to itself. A project may release a configuration baseline to the user community for beta testing.

Generally, three levels of baseline releases are required for most systems: major, minor, and interim. Each level corresponds to a numbered identifier such as N.M.X, where N is the major release number, M is the minor release number, and X is the interim release identifier. A major release represents a new generation of the product or project, while a minor release represents the same basic product but with enhanced features, performance, or quality. Major and minor releases are intended to be external product releases that are persistent and supported for a period of time. An interim release corresponds to a developmental configuration that is intended to be transient. The shorter its life cycle, the better. Figure 12-4 shows examples of some release name histories for two different situations.

Once software is placed in a controlled baseline, all changes are tracked. A distinction must be made for the cause of a change. Change categories are as follows:

• Type 0: critical failures, which are defects that are nearly always fixed before any external release. In general, these sorts of changes represent showstoppers that have an impact on the usability of the software in its critical use cases.

• Type 1 : a bug or defect that either does not impair the usefulness of the system or can be worked around. Such errors tend to correlate to nuisances in critical use cases or to serious defects in secondary use cases that have a low probability of occurrence.

Continue reading here: The Seven Core Metrics

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Readers' Questions

What are the three main automation components of smart display?
Context-Aware Automation: This component uses AI and machine learning algorithms to detect changes in the environment and take appropriate action. Automated Alerts: This component will send alerts that trigger action when a certain threshold is reached. Automation Platform: This component provides a platform to integrate other services, such as voice commands, IoT devices, and other systems, that can be triggered automatically.
What are the different types of project environment?
There are several different types of project environments, including: Stable environment: In a stable environment, the project scope and objectives remain relatively constant, and there are minimal external factors that can impact the project. Dynamic environment: In a dynamic environment, the project scope and objectives may change frequently due to changing circumstances or market conditions. There may be significant external factors that can impact the project. Predictable environment: In a predictable environment, the project team has prior experience and knowledge about how similar projects have been executed successfully in the past. This allows for the use of established processes and procedures. Unpredictable environment: In an unpredictable environment, the project team lacks prior experience or knowledge about how similar projects have been executed successfully. This requires a more flexible and adaptive approach to project management. Supportive environment: In a supportive environment, the project team receives the necessary resources, guidance, and support from the organization, stakeholders, and management. This helps ensure the project's success. Constrained environment: In a constrained environment, there are various limitations or restrictions that can hinder the progress of the project, such as limited budget, tight deadlines, or limited availability of resources. Virtual environment: In a virtual environment, team members are located in different geographic locations and work together remotely using technology to communicate and collaborate. This type of environment requires effective communication tools and processes. Hybrid environment: A hybrid environment combines elements from different types of project environments. For example, a project may have a stable scope but still operate in a dynamic market, or it may be in a supportive organization but face significant external constraints. It is essential for project managers to understand the type of project environment they are working in to effectively plan, execute, and manage the project.
Why SCO is called as atomic unit of software work?
SCO (Systems Configuration Operating) is called the atomic unit of software work because it is a unique environment for managing software development processes. It is a platform for establishing and maintaining software development projects. SCO also provides tools for debugging and testing, as well as for tracking progress. It is also used to ensure consistency among all the components of a software application. SCO is a key part of the software development life cycle and is the foundation of efficient software engineering.
What is meant by project environment?
Project Environment is the environment created by a project manager to manage a project. It includes all of the stakeholders involved in the project, the resources available to the project, the organizational structure of the project team, as well as the project management processes and tools used. Project Environment also encompasses the risk analysis and management processes that are used to ensure the project is completed on time and on budget.
What are main components of sco in software project management?
Requirements Management: Defining and managing system requirements, such as business needs and functional requirements. Project Planning and Scheduling: Developing a project plan and timeline for completion. Cost Management: Estimating and controlling project costs. Quality Assurance: Ensuring quality standards are met throughout the project. Risk Management: Identifying and mitigating risk throughout the project. Change Management: Managing change requests and ensuring the project stays on track. Documentation and Reporting: Documenting project progress and ensuring stakeholders are informed.
What is meant by SCO Briefly explain it's basic field in software project management?
SCO stands for Software Cost Estimation (SCO). It is a process of determining the cost of developing or deploying software. This process is used by project managers and software developers to estimate the time, effort, and cost of software development and maintenance. The process typically involves estimation of resources, completion time, and costs for software development, testing, and deployment. SCO also provides a method for structuring the software development lifecycle, from planning and scheduling to development and testing to deployment. SCO is an essential component of project management and software development, as it can help manage budgets, timeline, and resources more efficiently.

Project Risk Manager

The Importance of Understanding Project Environment and Context

Project Environment and Context

Most projects clearly define their objectives, work scope, budget, and schedule but, all too often, the environment and context in which the project exists is neither fully understood nor clearly defined. This is a major source of risk when it comes to project management and execution.

While having a clearly defined set of objectives, work scope, budget, and schedule is essential to being able to plan, implement, and control a project, if the project management team do not fully understand their project environment and context, the project will, in all likelihood, be doomed to failure. This is because project environment and context drives performance as much as, if not more than, a clearly defined work scope, budget, or schedule.

No two projects are the same, even if their objectives and work scope are. This is because even projects with identical objectives and work scopes will inevitably be executed in different environments. As such, the environmental factors are often the things that determine the success or failure of a project.

When evaluating the environmental and contextual shaping factors that differentiate one project from the next, it is important to consider the following:

  • Local weather/climate extremes
  • Geo-technical and topographical issues
  • Site access constraints
  • Utilities and local service availability
  • Environmental sensitivities
  • Human and material resource availability
  • Dealing with bribery and corruption issues
  • Managing differences between local and national policies
  • Adapting to sudden changes in political power or influence
  • Resolving conflicts between differing political factions
  • Prioritisation of standards
  • Local content requirements
  • Adherence to site-specific and local environmental regulations
  • Adherence to corporate Codes of Conduct
  • Restrictions on human and material resource availability
  • Personnel accommodation and work facilities
  • Local holidays and acceptable working hours
  • Restricted or protected areas
  • Security considerations and requirements
  • Design complexity
  • Human resource availability
  • Speed and efficiency in project execution
  • Adherence to scope and standards
  • Reliability and operability of the end-product
  • Safety in project execution and operation
  • Ability to finance the project
  • Changes to project scope and/or standards
  • Risk Attitude
  • Interests and Priorities

These are just a few of the environmental and contextual shaping factors that need to be considered when developing a project management or execution plan. The importance of fully understanding project environment and context should never be underestimated, as this can help prevent even the most technically well-defined projects from falling into disarray.

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Project Review Insights

Empowering Management Excellence

The harder you work for something, the greater you'll feel when you achieve it.

Understanding the Project Environment for Success ?

When it comes to managing projects, success often follows only by understanding the project environment better.

This environment I am talking about refers to both the internal and external factors that can make or break a project.

Understanding the Project Environment for Success ?

In this article, we’ll break down these aspects in a simple and easy-to-understand manner.

Internal environment: inside the organization.

The internal environment of a project is all about what’s happening within the organization.

It’s like the foundation on which your project is built.

For example:

  • Processes and Tools : Every organization has its own way of doing things. These processes, tools, and methodologies are like the building blocks of your project.
  • Data and Knowledge: Think of it as a treasure chest of past experiences. Lessons learned and data from previous projects can be gold for your current one.
  • Culture and Values: The company’s culture, values, and ethics are like the project’s DNA. They shape how your team works and makes decisions.
  • Resources and Infrastructure: This includes everything from office space and equipment to IT systems and people. Your project can’t thrive without these.
  • Security and Safety: Keeping things safe and confidential is vital. This covers everything from data protection to physical security.

External Environment: Outside the Organization

Now, let’s step outside the organization and into the world beyond. The external environment can have a big impact on your project too:

  • Marketplace Conditions: What’s happening in the market? Are there competitors, trends, or technology shifts that could affect your project’s success?
  • Social and Cultural Factors: Local customs, holidays, and cultural norms can influence how your project is perceived and received.
  • Regulations: Laws and regulations, like those related to data protection, employment, or business conduct, can be a game-changer.
  • Data and Research: Information from commercial databases, academic research, and industry standards can provide valuable insights for your project.
  • Financial Considerations: Currency exchange rates, interest rates, inflation, and taxes can all impact your project’s budget and financial health.
  • Physical Environment: Weather and working conditions can be crucial, especially if your project is location-dependent.

Why It Matters

Understanding the project environment is like having a map for your journey. It helps you anticipate challenges, leverage strengths, and adapt to changes.

Successful project managers pay attention to both the internal and external factors, making sure their projects are well-prepared for the road ahead.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, a project’s environment is a blend of what’s happening inside your organization and what’s going on in the world around you.

By recognizing and responding to these factors, you can set your project up for success. So, next time you embark on a project, consider the environment—it might just be the key to delivering value and achieving your goals.

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BUS610: Business Intelligence and Analytics

project environment was

Project Management

A key takeaway from this article is that "the purpose of operations is to keep the organization functioning while the purpose of a project is to meet its goals and conclude. Therefore, operations are ongoing while projects are unique and temporary". Why is this such an important distinction? Projects have a beginning and an end. Operations always hum along in the background while everyone else works on projects. Which category does BI fit into? What does the BI analyst do? List up to 10 activities. Which of these consists of persistent monitoring? Maybe there is an aspect the business decision-makers want to observe daily, weekly, or monthly. This could be production levels, hiring rates, training costs, or anything else. These would be considered operational activities. These are normally almost fully automated via dashboards with little input from the analyst once the program is set to run. There may be some analytic process you add before you submit the regular report, but you are not creating something unique and new. If this is all a firm uses its BI capacity for, it wastes a valuable resource that should be constantly put to work on long- and short-term projects to answer strategic-level questions.

Project Management Expertise

Understanding the project environment.

There are many factors that need to be understood within your project environment (Figure 2.7). At one level, you need to think in terms of the cultural and social environments (i.e., people, demographics, and education). The international and political environment is where you need to understand about different countries' cultural influences. Then we move to the physical environment; here we think about time zones. Think about different countries and how differently your project will be executed whether it is just in your country or if it involves an international project team that is distributed throughout the world in five different countries.

project environment was

Of all the factors, the physical ones are the easiest to understand, and it is the cultural and international factors that are often misunderstood or ignored. How we deal with clients, customers, or project members from other countries can be critical to the success of the project. For example, the culture of the United States values accomplishments and individualism. Americans tend to be informal and call each other by first names, even if having just met. Europeans tend to be more formal, using surnames instead of first names in a business setting, even if they know each other well. In addition, their communication style is more formal than in the United States, and while they tend to value individualism, they also value history, hierarchy, and loyalty. The Japanese, on the other hand, tend to communicate indirectly and consider themselves part of a group, not as individuals. The Japanese value hard work and success, as most of us do.

How a product is received can be very dependent on the international cultural differences. For example, in the 1990s, when many large American and European telecommunications companies were cultivating new markets in Asia, their customer's cultural differences often produced unexpected situations. Western companies planned their telephone systems to work the same way in Asia as they did in Europe and the United States. But the protocol of conversation was different. Call-waiting, a popular feature in the West, is considered impolite in some parts of Asia. This cultural blunder could have been avoided had the team captured the project environment requirements and involved the customer.

It is often the simplest things that can cause trouble since, unsurprisingly, in different countries, people do things differently. One of the most notorious examples of this is also one of the most simple: date formats. What day and month is 2/8/2009? Of course it depends where you come from; in North America it is February 8th while in Europe (and much of the rest of the world) it is 2nd August. Clearly, when schedules and deadlines are being defined it is important that everyone is clear on the format used.

The diversity of practices and cultures and its impact on products in general and on software in particular goes well beyond the date issue. You may be managing a project to create a new website for a company that sells products worldwide. There are language and presentation style issues to take into consideration; converting the site into different languages isn't enough. It is obvious that you need to ensure the translation is correct; however, the presentation layer will have its own set of requirements for different cultures. The left side of a website may be the first focus of attention for a Canadian; the right side would be the initial focus for anyone from the Middle East, as both Arabic and Hebrew are written from right to left. Colors also have different meanings in different cultures. White, which is a sign of purity in North America (e.g., a bride's wedding dress), and thus would be a favoured background colour in North America, signifies death in Japan (e.g., a burial shroud). Table 2.1 summarizes different meanings of common colours.

Table 2.1: The meaning of colours in various cultures.

Project managers in multicultural projects must appreciate the culture dimensions and try to learn relevant customs, courtesies, and business protocols before taking responsibility for managing an international project. A project manager must take into consideration these various cultural influences and how they may affect the project's completion, schedule, scope, and cost.

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  • Understanding the Project Environment

project environment was

There are many factors that need to be understood within your project environment ( Figure 2.7 The important factors to consider within the project environment.  ). At one level, you need to think in terms of the cultural and social environments (i.e., people, demographics, and education). The international and political environment is where you need to understand about different countries’ cultural influences. Then we move to the physical environment; here we think about time zones. Think about different countries and how differently your project will be executed whether it is just in your country or if it involves an international project team that is distributed throughout the world in five different countries.

Of all the factors, the physical ones are the easiest to understand, and it is the cultural and international factors that are often misunderstood or ignored. How we deal with clients, customers, or project members from other countries can be critical to the success of the project. For example, the culture of the United States values accomplishments and individualism. Americans tend to be informal and call each other by first names, even if having just met. Europeans tend to be more formal, using surnames instead of first names in a business setting, even if they know each other well. In addition, their communication style is more formal than in the United States, and while they tend to value individualism, they also value history, hierarchy, and loyalty. The Japanese, on the other hand, tend to communicate indirectly and consider themselves part of a group, not as individuals. The Japanese value hard work and success, as most of us do.

How a product is received can be very dependent on the international cultural differences. For example, in the 1990s, when many large American and European telecommunications companies were cultivating new markets in Asia, their customer’s cultural differences often produced unexpected situations. Western companies planned their telephone systems to work the same way in Asia as they did in Europe and the United States. But the protocol of conversation was different. Call-waiting, a popular feature in the West, is considered impolite in some parts of Asia. This cultural blunder could have been avoided had the team captured the project environment requirements and involved the customer.

It is often the simplest things that can cause trouble since, unsurprisingly, in different countries, people do things differently. One of the most notorious examples of this is also one of the most simple: date formats. What day and month is 2/8/2009? Of course it depends where you come from; in North America it is February 8th while in Europe (and much of the rest of the world) it is 2nd August. Clearly, when schedules and deadlines are being defined it is important that everyone is clear on the format used.

The diversity of practices and cultures and its impact on products in general and on software in particular goes well beyond the date issue. You may be managing a project to create a new website for a company that sells products worldwide. There are language and presentation style issues to take into consideration; converting the site into different languages isn’t enough. It is obvious that you need to ensure the translation is correct; however, the presentation layer will have its own set of requirements for different cultures. The left side of a website may be the first focus of attention for a Canadian; the right side would be the initial focus for anyone from the Middle East, as both Arabic and Hebrew are written from right to left. Colors also have different meanings in different cultures. White, which is a sign of purity in North America (e.g., a bride’s wedding dress), and thus would be a favored background color in North America, signifies death in Japan (e.g., a burial shroud). Figure 2.8 The meaning of colors in various cultures.   summarizes different meanings of common colors.

Project managers in multicultural projects must appreciate the culture dimensions and try to learn relevant customs, courtesies, and business protocols before taking responsibility for managing an international project. A project manager must take into consideration these various cultural influences and how they may affect the project’s completion, schedule, scope, and cost.

  • 11702 reads
  • Introduction
  • About the Book
  • Careers Using Project Management Skills
  • Outsourcing Services Example: Construction Managers
  • Creative Services Example: Graphic Artists
  • Educators Example: Teachers
  • Health Care Example: Radiology Technologists Example: Nurses
  • Software developer
  • Science Technicians
  • Attribution
  • Project Attributes
  • Definition of a Project
  • Project Characteristics
  • The Process of Project Management
  • Project Management Expertise
  • Application knowledge
  • Management Knowledge and Skills
  • Communication
  • Negotiation
  • Problem Solving
  • Initiation Phase
  • Planning Phase
  • Implementation (Execution) Phase
  • Closing Phase Example: Project Phases on a Large Multinational Project
  • Project Management Institute Overview
  • So what is PMBOK?
  • Project Start-Up and Integration
  • Project Scope
  • Project Schedule and Time Management
  • Project Costs
  • Project Quality
  • Project Team: Human Resources and Communications
  • Communications
  • Project Risk
  • Project Procurement
  • Project Stakeholder Management
  • Scrum Development Overview
  • The Project Management Office
  • Top Management
  • The Project Team
  • Your Manager
  • Resource Managers
  • Internal Customers
  • External customer
  • Contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers
  • Politics of Projects
  • Identify goals
  • Define the problem
  • Culture of Stakeholders Example: Culture Affects Communication in Mumbai Example: Cultural Differences between American Regions
  • Managing Stakeholders Example: Tire Plant in India Example: Stakeholders and a Bridge Project
  • Relationship Building Tips
  • How to Relate to Different Types of Stakeholders
  • Supportive Stakeholders are Essential to Project Success
  • Tools to Help Stakeholder Management
  • What Is Organizational Culture?
  • Project Manager’s Checklist
  • Project Team Challenges
  • Dealing with Conflict
  • Comparing Options Using a Weighted Decision Matrix
  • Weighted Decision Matrix Sample
  • Financial Considerations
  • NPV Example
  • Payback Period
  • Purpose of the Project Charter
  • Identification Section Example:
  • Overview of the Project Example
  • Objective Example
  • Scope Example Example
  • Major Milestones Example
  • Major Deliverables Example
  • Assumptions Example
  • Constraints Example:
  • Business Need or Opportunity (Benefits) Example:
  • Preliminary Cost for the Project Example:
  • Project Risks Example:
  • Project Charter Acceptance
  • Project Stakeholders
  • Defining the Scope
  • Project Requirements
  • Functional Requirements Vehicle Example Computer System Example
  • Non-Functional Requirements
  • Technical Requirements
  • Business Requirements
  • User Requirements
  • Regulatory requirements
  • An Example of Requirements
  • Software Requirements Fundamentals
  • Measuring Requirements
  • Scope Inputs
  • Requirements Traceability Matrix
  • Matrix Fields
  • Work Breakdown Structure
  • Example of a WBS
  • Scope Statement
  • Defining Activities
  • WBS Exercise (Solution follows)
  • Activity List
  • External Predecessors
  • Discretionary Predecessors
  • Mandatory Predecessors
  • Leads and Lags
  • The Activity Sequencing Process
  • Creating the Gantt Chart
  • Creating the Network Diagram
  • The Critical Path
  • Estimating the Resources
  • Estimating Activity Durations
  • Project Schedule and Critical Path
  • Resource Management
  • HR Planning
  • Managing the Team
  • Techniques for Managing Resources
  • Resource Leveling
  • Working with Individuals
  • Emotional Intelligence
  • Personality Types
  • Leadership Styles Example: Multinational Textbook Publishing Project
  • Leadership Skills
  • Listening Example: Client’s Body Language
  • Conflict Resolution Example: Resolving an Office Space Conflict Example: Conflict Over a Change Order
  • Delegation Example: Learning Project in Peru
  • Adjusting Leadership Styles
  • Contracts and Trust Relationships
  • Types of Trust
  • Creating Trust Example: High Cost of Lying in a Charleston Project
  • Managing Team Meetings
  • Action Item Meetings
  • Management Meetings
  • Leadership Meetings
  • Functional Teams
  • Cross-Functional Teams Example: Cross-Functional Teamwork
  • Problem-Solving Teams
  • Qualitative Assessment of Project Performance Example: Humm Survey Uncovers Concerns
  • Characteristics of Project Culture Example: Operational Rules on a Multi-site Project Example: Creating a Culture of Collaboration
  • Innovation on Projects Example: Stress Managed on a Website Design Project
  • Estimating Costs to Compare and Select Projects
  • Analogous Estimate Example: Analogous Estimate for John’s Move
  • Parametric Estimate Example: Parametric Estimate for John’s Move
  • Bottom-Up Estimating Example: Bottom-Up Estimate for John’s Move
  • Activity-Based Estimates
  • Managing Cash Flow
  • Contingency Reserves
  • Management Reserves
  • Evaluating the Budget During the Project Example: Reporting Budget Progress on John’s Move
  • Earned Value Analysis Example: Planned Value on Day Six of John’s Move Example: Comparing PV, EV, and AC in John’s Move on Day Six
  • Schedule Variance Example: Schedule Variance on John’s Move Example: Cost Variance on John’s Move Example: Cost Performance Index of John’s Move
  • Estimated Cost to Complete the Project Example: Estimate to Complete John’s Move
  • Estimate Final Project Cost Example: Estimate at Completion for John’s Move
  • Establishing a Budget
  • Budget Timeline
  • Make-or-Buy Analysis
  • Fixed-Price Contracts
  • Cost-Reimbursable Contracts
  • Progress Payments and Change Management
  • Procurement Plan
  • Selecting the Contract Approach
  • Soliciting Bids
  • Qualifying Bidders
  • Request for Quote
  • Request for Proposal
  • Evaluating Bids
  • Awarding the Contract
  • Managing the Contracts
  • Logistics and Expediting
  • Quality and Grade Example: Quality of Gasoline Grades Example: Quality of Furniture Packing
  • Statistics Example: Setting Control Limits Example: Normal Distribution Example: Standard Deviation of Gasoline Samples Example: Gasoline Within Three Standard Deviations Example: A Step Project Improves Quality of Gasoline
  • Quality planning tools Example: Tolerance in Gasoline Production
  • Defining and Meeting Client Expectations
  • Sources of Planning Information
  • Techniques Example: Diagramming Quality Problems
  • Quality Assurance
  • Process Analysis Example: Analyzing Quality Processes in Safety Training
  • Types of Communication
  • Synchronous Communications
  • Remember Time Zones Example: Conference Call between Toronto and Paris
  • Mail and Package Delivery
  • Project Blog
  • Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
  • Assessing New Communication Technologies
  • Communication Plan Template
  • Risk Management Process
  • Risk Identification Example: Risks in John’s Move
  • Risk Evaluation Example: Risk Analysis of Equipment Delivery
  • Risk Mitigation
  • Contingency Plan
  • Initiation Example: Risks by Phase in John’s Move
  • Planning Phase Example: Risk Breakdown Structure for John’s Move
  • Implementation Phase
  • Closeout Phase Example: Risk Closeout on John’s Move
  • Change Control
  • Contract Closure
  • Releasing the Project Team
  • Final Payments
  • Post-Project Evaluations
  • Trust and Alignment Effectiveness
  • Schedule and Budget Management
  • Procurement Contracts
  • Customer Satisfaction
  • Senior Management
  • Archiving of Document
  • Appendix 1: Project Management PowerPoints
  • Chapter 5: Project Management Overview
  • Chapter 6: The Project Life Cycle (Phases)
  • Chapter 8: Stakeholder Management
  • Chapter 10: Project Initiation
  • Chapter 12: Scope Planning
  • Chapter 13: Project Schedule Planning
  • Chapter 15: Budget Planning
  • Chapter 16: Procurement Management
  • Chapter 17: Quality Planning
  • Chapter 19: Risk Management Planning
  • Appendix 3: Chapter Audio Files
  • About the Author

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The Project Environment – Enhance Performance  

  December 6, 2020

By   Dave Litten

The Project Environment – The need for Projects

Organizations operate in a dynamic context, full of uncertainty, novelty, and turbulence. This article identifies how organizations can use projects, programmes, and portfolios to enhance performance, bring about change, and enable organizations to adapt, improve, and grow. Every project environment is critically designed for peak performance.

Project-work, therefore, represents an intentional investment in development, enhancement, and improvement. The need for investment emerges from the aspirational plans and an overarching purpose that transpire from the strategic intent of an organization, reflected in each project’s business case. Project-work encompasses strategic investments that enable assets, structures, systems, activities, and capabilities to be formed, maintained, or enhanced so that the organizational plans and ambitions can be realized.

Organizational Change

Organizational change is introduced through projects, programmes, and portfolios to deliver business value. The business value is accrued through the realization of benefits that result from project-work.

Benefits are part of ensuring that investments are made to deliver value to the organization. This normally applies even when the project is being done by a supplier or contracting organization, or if the work is needed to maintain current capability or to conform to new regulations or directives so that smooth business operations can be allowed to proceed.

The successful deployment of change, the support of new behaviours and the utilization of new capability, resulting in the realization of benefits, involves engaging with, promoting, and working with diverse communities and groups. To ensure that value is created and sustained, organizations need to consider and address the full investment life cycle ensuring that forecasted benefits materialise.

Delivering Project Strategy

Delivering strategy is enabled using projects, programmes, and portfolios. Portfolios structure investments in line with strategic objectives, while balancing, aligning, and scrutinising capacity and resources.

Programmes combine business-as-usual with projects and steady-state activity dictated by strategic priorities. Projects are transient endeavours that bring about change and achieve planned objectives. Together, they combine to deliver the beneficial change required to implement, enable and satisfy the strategic intent of the organisation. Stakeholders, those individuals, or groups who have an interest or role in the project, programme, or portfolio, or are impacted by it, cannot by definition be ‘managed’.

Rather, depending on their stake, and the role that ideally, they will play, the people involved in the work, from sponsor to team member, are part of the effort to keep the stakeholder appropriately engaged and influenced to do the right things. This is not easy work and benefits from a facilitative approach rather than assuming that ‘command-and-control’ approaches will be effective.

The Project Environment influence on projects

It is relevant that the first section of a learning resource on project management considers the reasons why that project may need to exist in the first place.

An initial thought is that the organization is faced with a constantly changing environment that is creating problems, opportunities or business needs requiring some degree of response if threats are to be minimized, opportunities exploited, and business needs effectively addressed.

Every project is a response to a changing project environment. Within that environment are the factors that influence and impact projects.

project environment was

Organizations must develop a strategic approach to managing change. Projects deliver the beneficial change required to implement, enable, and satisfy the strategic intent of the organization. Practically this will be achieved by deploying new assets, functions, capabilities, processes, structures, and systems.

The environment is the driving force for the project. It is important for the project manager to understand how these drivers are likely to influence the project. It may impact how they deliver the project, what they deliver, who is involved and when it needs to be delivered.

At the project start, answers to some of these questions may be uncertain. As a result, planning needs to be flexible, options need to be effectively evaluated and various scenarios assessed in order for the project to emerge as the optimum solution to what might be a range of diverse needs.

Tools and techniques for the project Environment

The impact of infrastructure, the physical environment, mitigating the potential adverse impacts of other projects and the project’s technology are just some of the factors the project manager must consider when planning the delivery of a project.

Shorter term practical implementation impacts of the project as well as its conceptual development and consequent long-term impacts also need to be fully considered.

In addition, project managers also need to be attuned to the internal aspects, such as the cultural, organizational, and social environments of the project’s sponsoring organization.

Understanding this environment includes identifying the project stakeholders and their ability to affect its successful outcome. This means working with people to achieve the best results, especially if the project is based in a highly technical or complex environment.

Resistance to Change

It is essential that the project manager and the project team are comfortable with, and sympathetic towards, their physical, technological, cultural, organisational and social surroundings.

The objective is influencing the project environment in a positive way or changing the way the project is being delivered, all with the aim of gaining a better reception of the change the project is designed to introduce. Resistance to change may be evident among some of the stakeholders, while others may have vested interests, personal or group agendas that are only indirectly related to the project. Timely identification and categorization of these interests proactively mean that the corresponding risks, which are otherwise likely to undermine the success of the project, can be significantly reduced. Failure to take such an approach could inevitably lead to a less than optimum project outcome. Every project team member needs to develop the attitude that, just as they are stakeholders, every other project stakeholder is also important.

There should be a commitment to service and the creation of a project management environment in which every decision and action is designed to make the stakeholder’s experience better than it would have been had the project not been implemented. It requires a focus on the quality of the stakeholder’s experience at every stage of the project.

There are several common forms of environmental analysis from simple external/internal factors analysis to using a more specific framework.

One of the more common forms of analysis for the project environment is PESTLE analysis, a management technique to help project management understand the environment in which the project operates.

project environment was

PESTLE analysis is a popular method of examining the many different factors affecting an organization and the project – the external or internal influences on success or failure.

The impact of these factors on the project may be differentiated in six ways: Political – Current and potential influences from political pressures. Economic – Local, national, and world economic impact. Sociological – The effect of changes in the needs of society. Technological – New and emerging technology. Legal – Local, national, and world legislation. Environmental – Local, national, and world environmental issues.

The six factors may be applied to the whole of the organization, or to specific business areas, or to a specific project and could consider external only, internal-only or both, to contemplate the likely effects.

Business areas could include: customers the industry/marketplace competitors supply sources internal capability technology intermediaries stakeholders time governance requirements

Following PESTLE analysis, an organization would most likely have several options available as to how the desired objectives could be achieved. One strength of a business case for a project is that several options have been considered and that there is evidence to show that the organization has not become over-reliant on a single idea, when there may be other more favourable options available.

SWOT analysis

The purpose of SWOT analysis is to use an established framework to systematically understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that each project option may face.

SWOT can be particularly powerful in uncovering opportunities that the project may be well placed to take advantage of but that the project team may never have considered when using other forms of comparison. Similarly, understanding weaknesses of the project options allow for the best approach to be considered in advance, allowing a pro-active approach avoiding threats that would otherwise catch the project team unawares.

project environment was

PESTLE can be used to consider the environment and to establish options for consideration SWOT may be used as an evaluation tool to test the options being considered and so is more of comparative analysis. SWOT can be used in a wide variety of situations where a comparative analysis is required. It can also be used for uncovering the strengths and weaknesses of the organization in relation to the project and in addition isolate the threats and opportunities that may exist in that relationship.

Both PESTLE and SWOT analysis could be used with good rigour but still raise more questions than answers. Caution should always be expressed when appraising the outputs of traditional models. The increasing level of uncertainty that exists and the combination of economic unknowns with political, social, and environmental concerns regarding the proposed actions and their longer-term implications may require new ways of engaging with uncertainty.

The US military coined the term VUCA to reflect the ‘volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity’ of general conditions and situations associated with a multilateral world following the end of the Cold War in the early nineties. The term has been widely adopted to represent increasingly vulnerable and unpredictable contexts. The key implication of VUCA conditions is that there is an inherent uncertainty that makes it difficult to predict and plan with great accuracy. The rigidity that comes from expecting full and perfect knowledge is unsustainable and unattainable in turbulent environments. Uncertainty defies anticipation and detailed planning.

VUCA seeks to give a perspective of the project to enable managers to identify emerging opportunities, respond to new conditions, and address shortfalls and differences in outcomes, avoiding the classic mismatches between plans, models, and reality, translating into poor project performance.

project environment was

The above diagram shows an example of how an organization might use VUCA to understand the risks in particular project situations. The two causative factors, level of confidence in the outcome, and current knowledge are combined and rated high or low. If the organization has high confidence in outcomes and a high-level of knowledge it should consider if there is any volatility in the situation, could interest rates suddenly rise, or the costs of materials fluctuate unexpectedly for example. The risk here could originate from complacency and the project becomes exposed to uncontrolled change. In the opposite situation, low confidence and low available data, there is likely to be ambiguity and therefore the project is likely to have difficulty delivering requirements to the satisfaction of stakeholders unless it can use a robust process for defining requirements more reliably. At the heart of VUCA is the development of a learning culture for greater levels of preparedness, anticipation, evolution, and pro-active intervention. A failure to process and manage learning is one of the major causes of projects failing to perform to the required degree

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Dave Litten

David spent 25 years as a senior project manager for USA multinationals, and has deep experience in project management. He now develops a wide range of Project Management Masterclasses, under the Projex Academy brand name. In addition, David runs project management training seminars across the world, and is a prolific writer on the many topics of project management.

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News | Gondola project from Union Station to Dodger…

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  • Environment

News | Gondola project from Union Station to Dodger Stadium gets first approval from LA Metro

The project has a long was to go and needs approval of l.a. city council, plus state and federal agencies.

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Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of Climate Resolve, speaks in favor of Frank McCourt’s Dodger Stadium gondola project during the Los Angeles Metro Board meeting’s public comment on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Los Angles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez speaks out against Frank...

Los Angles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez speaks out against Frank McCourt’s Dodger Stadium gondola project during the Los Angeles Metro Board meeting’s public comment on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Phyllis Ling speaks out against Frank McCourt’s Dodger Stadium gondola...

Phyllis Ling speaks out against Frank McCourt’s Dodger Stadium gondola project during the Los Angeles Metro Board meeting’s public comment on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Metro Board Member Ara Najarian speaks about Frank McCourt’s Dodger...

Metro Board Member Ara Najarian speaks about Frank McCourt’s Dodger Stadium gondola project during the Los Angeles Metro Board meeting on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

People protest Frank McCourt’s Dodger Stadium gondola project during the...

People protest Frank McCourt’s Dodger Stadium gondola project during the Los Angeles Metro Board meeting on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Louie Opatz and Mary Venderley, who say they don’t want...

Louie Opatz and Mary Venderley, who say they don’t want to see residents get displaced or another city walk, protest the Frank McCourt’s Dodger Stadium gondola project during the Los Angeles Metro Board meeting on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Artist rendering of the gondola ride to Dodger Stadium, from...

Artist rendering of the gondola ride to Dodger Stadium, from Union Station and Chinatown/LA State Historic State Park Station. (Courtesy of Los Angeles Aerial Rapid Transit)

An artist rendering of what a LA ART gondola would...

An artist rendering of what a LA ART gondola would look like en route to Dodger Stadium from Los Angeles Union Station. The project has received pushback from Chinatown residents, city of LA and Homeboy Industries. Yet it received recent support from Coalition For Clean Air. However, LA City Council member Eunisses Hernandez on Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2023, has introduced a motion asking for a traffic study before L.A. would take any action on the project. The project is up for a vote on Thursday, Feb. 22 at the LA Metro board.(courtesy of Los Angeles Aerial Rapid Transit )

A proposed 1.2-mile aerial tramway that would transport baseball fans to Dodger Stadium via sky-high gondolas above Chinatown and other neighborhoods in northeast Los Angeles received a major boost on Thursday, Feb. 22.

The controversial project that has attracted considerable opposition, received the green light from the LA Metro board, which approved the project’s Final Environmental Impact Report and determined the project fits within the state’s regional transportation plan. The board voted 11-0-1, with Fourth District Supervisor and Metro board member Janice Hahn abstaining.

Approval of the environmental report is a first step toward making Los Angeles’ first gondola transit project a reality. However, the project also will need approvals from the Los Angeles City Council, Caltrans, the Federal Highway Administration. the California Transportation Commission and California State Parks, according to Metro staff.

In addition, the project developer will need to secure property acquisitions, land leases, air rights as well as state and federal sign-offs. If these are obtained, the project will come back to the LA Metro board for construction approval. No timeframe was set for what could be a drawn-out process.

“This doesn’t mean we are greenlighting it,”  said Los Angeles City Council President and Metro board member Paul Krikorian. “The city of L.A. process will be robust. Land use approvals are in the hands of the City of Los Angeles.”

Nonetheless, the Metro vote was historic. It was the first time Metro board voted to approve design and environmental documents for an unsolicited, non-Metro project. As lead agency under the California Environmental Quality Act, Metro is legally required to oversee the environmental process for all transit-related projects in Los Angeles County moving forward.

The Los Angeles Aerial Rapid Transit (LAART) project was submitted to LA Metro by L.A. Dodgers’ former owner Frank McCourt in April 2018 and was not asked for by Metro. McCourt owns 50% of the parking lots at Dodger Stadium which court records show he may use for mixed-use development, including residential and retail uses.

Aerial Rapid Transit Technologies (ARTT), a limited partnership that McCourt formed, was bankrolling the environmental review and preliminary design process. LA Metro will be reimbursed for staff time. Last year, McCourt Global gifted the project to a new entity, Zero Emissions Transit. ZET is the nonprofit owner responsible for building, financing and operating the gondola project.

An artist rendering of what a LA ART gondola would look like en route to Dodger Stadium from Los Angeles Union Station. The project has received pushback from Chinatown residents, city of LA and Homeboy Industries. Yet it received recent support from Coalition For Clean Air. However, LA City Council member Eunisses Hernandez on Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2023, has introduced a motion asking for a traffic study before L.A. would take any action on the project. The project is up for a vote on Thursday, Feb. 22 at the LA Metro board.(courtesy of Los Angeles Aerial Rapid Transit )

The gondolas would take passengers over Chinatown, Solano Canyon, El Pueblo and Chavez Ravine on overhead buckets that accommodate 30-40 passengers. It is estimated to transport 5,000 passengers per hour on a sky-high, Disneyland-esque, 1.2 mile ride that would last seven minutes, according to Metro. The project would include three stations with 13-story towers on Alameda Street across from L.A.’s historic Union Station, at the Los Angeles State Historic Park, and atop Chavez Ravine at Dodger Stadium.

As part of the approval, the Metro board attached a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) with a list of conditions that must be satisfied before ZET can begin construction. These include: a plan to expand the existing Dodger Stadium Express which shuttles passengers to the stadium entrance while converting to zero-emission electric buses. A similar condition asks for a study of alternatives to the gondola project that would lessen traffic congestion during the 82 Dodger home games, including a new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) on Sunset Boulevard.

An unusual condition attached to the project requires setting aside 25% of stadium parking lots considered for development as affordable housing.

First District Supervisor Hilda Solis and Metro board member pushed back against comments by project opponents, who told this news organization that those conditions are nothing more than lip service. “It (CBA) provides guardrails. It enhances transparency and ensures the community their concerns must be addressed,” Solis said.

Metro officials ensured Solis that conditions imposed would have to be met by ZET or Metro would hold back on approval of land use and air space lease agreements, preventing construction and operation of the gondolas.

The Metro board took more than two hours of public comments, which were mixed between supporters and opponents.

Those in favor included: Dodger fans, who wanted an easier way to reach the stadium on game day and members of ZET and its parent nonprofit, Climate Resolve, as well as other residents who said the gondolas will take cars off the roads, reduce air pollution as well as greenhouse gases that cause global climate change.

As the co-organizer of the first CicLAvia that inspires people to ride a bike, Jonathan Parfrey, founder and executive director of Climate Resolve, said the project would remove cars and reduce pollution. But it also will have a warming effect on riding public transit. “I believe the aerial gondola will be similarly inspirational for people to take public transit,” he told the board.

“It will transform the transit experience for Angelenos,” said David Kim, a ZET board member and former California secretary of transportation.

Opponents included residents of Chinatown whose neighborhoods, and in some cases, houses and backyards, would forever be changed by overhead gondolas and towers holding cables powered with humming electric motors; conservation groups that disagree with a station at the Los Angeles State Historic Park and residents who view it as a gift to a billionaire developer and not a solution to traffic, congestion and air pollution.

“This is an overpriced theme park ride that rips into our Chinatown neighborhood, built on the backs of low-income communities,” said Phyllis Ling, organizer of Stop The Gondola, a coalition of hundreds of Chinatown and Solano Canyon residents and 29 member agencies .

Others from the communities directly affected said the project would cause more traffic woes, not less, as people park at stations, add noise pollution and blight from the presence of large towers. Tommy Ling, a Chinatown resident, said the project doesn’t have a funding plan.

The cost has risen from $125 million six years ago to between $385 million and $500 million in January 2024. Ling said the conditions don’t make the project much better.

Members of the business community, including the business group BizFed, supported the project, saying it would bring in more tourist activity to Chinatown and the region.

“We think it will help draw new guests to Olvera Street,” said Dominic Camacho, an owner of Camacho’s Cafe. He said Olvera street and El Pueblo area eateries have suffered lately and would benefit from the ridership.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, whose district includes the project corridor, asked Metro to turn it down, even with the added conditions.  “A project that needs more than 30 checks and balances to make it palatable, many of which are not enforceable by this body, is a project that can’t stand on its feet,” she said.

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Crime and Public Safety | Child shot in car in Santa Ana, is reported to be in critical condition

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GPA looks to pay for faster federal review of Savannah River terminal project

In September 2020 the CMA CGM BRAZIL became the largest container ship to call on Savannah Port.

The Georgia Ports Authority plans to tap its financial resources to expedite approval of a key permit for a proposed 400-acre terminal on the Savannah River, and federal officials say they intend to go along with the deal. 

But not before the public has a chance to weigh in, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers disclosed in a notice posted Wednesday . 

The corps is evaluating whether the project on Hutchinson Island meets requirements of the federal Clean Water Act after ending public comment on GPA's related permit request late last year.

Before that permit can be issued, however, Section 408 of the Clean Water Act requires USACE to determine whether the work would significantly impact other federally authorized projects.

"(Wednesday's) public notice is requesting comments on our intent to accept funds (from GPA) to expedite the processing of the 408 permit," said Cheri Pritchard, spokesperson for the USACE Savannah District. "

That input will be accepted through March 7.

Pritchard added that USACE is working with GPA in the application process for potential payments.

The corps' ended public comment on GPA's primary permit application on Christmas Day, despite pleas from environmental and social justice organizations to extend the deadline a second time. USACE had already added 30 days to the comment period and said "extending it further isn’t warranted."

Critics argued that more time was needed to digest the 56-page permit application for the mega-complex.

In terms of a pay-for-pace arrangement with GPA, "the USACE Savannah District does not expect priority review of the requester’s projects to negatively impact the Section 408 program or to increase the time for evaluations of other projects since additional staff may be hired to augment these priority reviews," the corps said in its notice, which did not include financial terms.

Dredging again: Does Savannah's harbor need to be deepened again? GPA, politicians urge study

'Maintaining a 20% cushion'

According to the permit application, GPA expects the terminal, which will house cargo containers transported on ships, to add 2.7 million “20-foot equivalent units” in overall capacity.   

Expansion projects already underway are expected to absorb projected growth at the booming ports for another decade. But GPA argues that without added capacity from the proposed terminal, increased activity through 2035 will eat away at overflow space.  

“Maintaining a 20% cushion provides operational flexibility” and allows the ports to “run efficiently through the peaks and valleys of the shipping season,” GPA says in its application.  

The Port of Savannah completed a $937 million expansion – including deepening the harbor channel to allow for larger vessels – in 2022. GPA is proposing another project to add still more depth. 

The requested terminal permit applies to regulations in the U.S. Clean Water Act regarding the discharge of dredged or fill material into public waters. The port’s plan calls for dredging more than 2.5 million cubic yards of material from nearly 30 acres of open water and 8.6 acres of tidal area. “Annual maintenance dredging” of an estimated 250,000 cubic yards would continue after completion of the project.  

The application calls for filling in nearly 27 acres of freshwater wetlands and 5.6 acres of salt marsh on Hutchinson Island. 

The site now includes 127 acres of salt marsh, nearly 41 acres of “intertidal or subtidal water bottoms” and 36 acres of freshwater wetlands. 

Fueling debate: Expansion of Savannah natural gas export facility at crux of nation's climate debate

'Serious implications for ... important natural resources'

In comments ahead of the Christmas deadline, a coalition of conservation and social justice groups urged USACE to carefully weigh the potential impact on the environment and residents who live nearby. 

“The project site contains various aquatic habitats, including estuarine waters, freshwater marsh, freshwater forested wetlands and mixed hardwood uplands,” the organizations said in a 26-page document. “This major development project will have serious implications for these important natural resources, and the Corps must fully assess these impacts before approving the project.”  

The Southern Environmental Law Center drafted the document on behalf of the Savannah Riverkeeper , Georgia Conservancy , Ogeechee Riverkeeper , One Hundred Miles, South Carolina Coastal Conservation League and South Carolina Wildlife Federation . 

Commenters also noted the prospective human impact.

About 96 percent of residents within one mile of the proposed terminal are people of color, and 60% are considered low-income, according to the Environmental Protection Agency . The same people face more exposure to particulate matter and other pollutants than 90% of the population, the EPA says. 

Wednesday’s posting noted that the corps "shall ensure that the use of funds accepted ... will not impact impartial decision making with respect to permits, either substantively or procedurally.  

John Deem covers climate change and the environment on the Georgia coast. He can be reached at [email protected].  

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To Save San Francisco, a Democrat Wants to Scrap Environmental Reviews

State Senator Scott Wiener hopes to spur redevelopment in the struggling downtown core by eliminating a major environmental hurdle.

A bus pulls up to a stop in downtown San Francisco at night. More than a dozen people are standing and waiting.

By Heather Knight

Reporting from San Francisco

Not long ago, it would have sounded preposterous: a San Francisco Democrat asking to peel back California’s treasured environmental protections in the heart of the city.

It would have been like painting the Golden Gate Bridge gray or cheering on the Los Angeles Dodgers. It just would not have flown.

But as California grows more desperate for housing and San Francisco struggles to revive its city core, State Senator Scott Wiener says one thing must go: environmental review.

Mr. Wiener on Friday will propose one of the broadest rollbacks of the once-vaunted California Environmental Quality Act by asking the state legislature to allow most projects in downtown San Francisco to bypass the law for the next decade.

Empty buildings could more easily be demolished to build theaters, museums or college campuses, Mr. Wiener said. Office towers could more readily be converted to a wide variety of housing. The withering mall on Market Street could more quickly become something else — like the soccer stadium that Mayor London Breed has envisioned.

“We know we need to make downtown viable,” Ms. Breed, a sponsor of the bill, said. “We can’t let process get in the way.”

For decades, Democrats in the mold of Mr. Wiener and Ms. Breed were among the most ardent defenders of CEQA, a landmark law signed in 1970, months after the celebration of the first Earth Day. But in recent years, a growing number of Democrats have begrudged the environmental act as a barrier to the projects they want, from infill housing to solar farms. Gov. Gavin Newsom is among its critics, last year urging the legislature to revamp portions of the law so California could “build, build, build.”

When CEQA (pronounced “see-qua”) was enacted, it gave residents a new way to challenge government projects during a building boom that followed World War II, as freeways were cutting through pastures and neighborhoods and as rivers were being dammed.

The California Supreme Court broadened the law in 1972 and said it could apply to almost any project in the state. That opened the door for environmentalists to challenge suburban developments and polluting factories, but also gave anyone with a grievance the ability to slow or kill projects. CEQA can force layers of review, litigation costs and years of delay, enough to render construction infeasible.

The law is hardly all that stands in the way of San Francisco and its downtown prosperity — 35 percent of office space remains empty four years after the onset of the pandemic. But there are glaring examples of how the environmental act has been used to try to block projects including food pantries and testing sites for Covid-19.

“We’ve had bike lanes stopped by CEQA. It’s crazy,” said Jim Wunderman, chief executive of the Bay Area Council, a business-friendly public policy group.

In one high-profile case, a nonprofit that owns and operates affordable housing used the state law in 2022 to argue that a plan to build hundreds of apartments on an empty Nordstrom parking lot would gentrify a neighborhood in downtown San Francisco — a socioeconomic argument that has gained traction in recent years. The Board of Supervisors sided with the nonprofit and asked for more environmental review.

“In this beautiful concrete jungle of downtown San Francisco, should environmental review operate that way?” Mr. Wiener asked as he walked through the Financial District, which was dotted with retail vacancies and “For Rent” signs.

Mr. Wiener has already pushed changes through the State Legislature to ease regulations on development, particularly for housing. He wrote legislation in 2017 that accelerated construction of affordable housing in cities that were not keeping up with state-issued housing targets and pushed for some transit projects and certain infill housing developments to be exempted from CEQA. And state lawmakers for years have sped review for major downtown stadium projects, including the Chase Center in San Francisco and SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif.

But exempting such a wide section — 150 blocks — of a city from environmental review would be a first.

Under Mr. Wiener’s proposal, San Francisco officials wouldn’t spend a year or more analyzing the environmental impacts of each redevelopment project, one by one, and average citizens wouldn’t have the right to sue to halt them.

To Mr. Wiener, this is the definition of environmentalism in today’s California, a state experiencing a lack of housing and growing homelessness in an era of climate change.

California environmentalism used to focus on preserving animal habitats, open space and beaches — and fighting developers at all cost. But Mr. Wiener argues that adding dense housing near jobs and public transit should be at the heart of the environmental movement. He and other Democrats have said that infill housing will cut down on hourslong car commutes and prevent additional sprawl.

A wholesale exemption for downtown San Francisco will undoubtedly face opposition at home and the State Capitol. Mr. Wiener’s proposal to accelerate development near transit stops, overriding local zoning laws, died in the legislature several years ago after a tough fight. At the time, local governments and low-income Californians argued that Mr. Wiener’s proposal would push existing renters to cheaper outskirts while benefiting developers and more affluent tenants.

A similar argument is likely this year. Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, which aims to eliminate homelessness and poverty, said the proposal seemed to be a giveaway to developers and could further push the poorest workers out of the city.

Some environmentalists may side with Mr. Wiener. Jake Mackenzie, a board member of the Greenbelt Alliance, said he would much prefer infill development over projects like California Forever, a plan by tech titans to build a new town on farmland about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco.

But others will very likely look askance at granting such a sweeping waiver of the state’s landmark environmental law.

David Lewis, executive director of Save the Bay, said his group was one of the first backers of Mr. Wiener’s proposals to stimulate housing construction near transit. But he added that Mr. Wiener’s new plan sounded “pretty extreme.”

He agreed with critics who say that environmentalists and other opponents of development have abused state laws. But he said that environmental review was important, observing that construction projects can create a lot of noise, pollute the air or cause traffic jams — and it would be important to know those harmful effects beforehand.

“People in government make smarter decisions when the public has more information, and that’s what’s at the heart of CEQA,” he said. “Exempting major projects from analysis is not the answer.”

Still, Mr. Wiener could find support from powerful labor allies, who have found themselves increasingly opposed to environmentalists in California. The bill being introduced Friday would waive environmental review for only projects that pay a prevailing wage, generally a rate negotiated by unions. It would still require environmental review for hotels and waterfront property, as well as for the demolition of any building that housed tenants within the past decade.

Mr. Wiener says that San Francisco is in dire need of a change. The California law gives local governments some leeway in how they apply CEQA, and San Francisco has long given more credence than other cities to development critics. A top state housing official denounced the city’s roadblocks to housing construction as “egregious” last year.

Mr. Wiener said exempting almost all projects downtown for a decade was necessary because many of the potential solutions for reviving the area — like a new college campus, student dorms, theaters, museums or artificial intelligence or biotech hubs — could otherwise be stalled.

After a strong rebuke from the state, San Francisco eventually approved the Nordstrom parking lot project. But the developer, Lou Vasquez, said it no longer pencils out financially after so much delay.

“It remains a parking lot,” he said. The Nordstrom no longer exists, either.

Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California. More about Heather Knight

The Virginian-Pilot

Environment | Dominion seeks to sell 50% share of Virginia…

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Environment

Environment | dominion seeks to sell 50% share of virginia offshore wind farm to help finance project.

FILE - Two of the offshore wind turbines which have been constructed off the coast of Virginia Beach, Va. are viewed June 29, 2020. State regulators on Friday, Aug. 5, 2022, approved an application from Dominion Energy Virginia to build an enormous offshore wind farm off the coast of Virginia Beach and recover the cost from ratepayers. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

Dominion Energy announced it will pursue the sale of a 50% non-controlling stake in the offshore wind farm being built off the coast of Virginia Beach in order to help finance the project.

Dominion is seeking to partner with New York firm Stonepeak, which has over $61 billion in assets and is one of the world’s largest investors in infrastructure projects, including other offshore wind installations, according to  Thursday earnings call documents . The sale wouldn’t impact utility billing, which would remain about $4 a month over the life of the project for the typical residential customer, and wouldn’t change how the bill appears, according to a Dominion spokesperson.

The deal needs to be approved by regulators such as the State Corporation Commission. If approved, the transaction is anticipated to close by the end of the year.

Dominion previously indicated it intended to offload such a non-controlling interest for the roughly $9.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project as part of a “de-risking” strategy, according to Bob Blue, Dominion president, chair and CEO. While other offshore wind projects have recently hit stumbling blocks, Blue previously told The Virginian-Pilot those projects had a different regulatory model than this project and Dominion was better able to price in for contingencies.

The deal with Stonepeak means Dominion will have a well-capitalized partner to cost share the project, which would help protect the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project from unanticipated cost overruns, Blue said in a release Thursday.

“We have reviewed the transaction with our credit-rating agencies and expect the transaction to be viewed as a significant credit-positive, which will ultimately benefit our customers,” Blue said in the release. “A financially healthy Dominion Energy with a strong credit profile and balance sheet is optimally positioned to attract the capital we need to provide an exceptional customer experience and support the Commonwealth of Virginia’s economic and environmental goals.”

The wind farm, 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, is slated to consist of 176 wind turbines with three substations that would generate power for roughly 660,000 homes. Construction is slated to start in May with a completion date of the end of 2026.

Stonepeak will contribute $3 billion at the sale and cover varying percentages of the project based on costs if it starts to go over budget, according to documents shared as part of the earnings call. When complete, Stonepeak will make another payment to Dominion, though that amount will also be based on total cost of the project.

Dominion has emphasized the project remains on time and on budget while other wind farm plans have faltered due to financing and regulatory hurdles.

Arrival of hulking steel structures at Port of Virginia marks progress in Virginia offshore wind project

The third shipment of eight monopiles — foundations for the turbines — arrived Wednesday in Portsmouth.

Charybdis, the vessel being built to install the turbines, is also over 80% complete and remains on track with a budget of $625 million, according to earnings call documents.

Dominion previously said it was searching for a non-controlling equity partner for the project as one of several strategies to strengthen its balance sheet and reduce the need for external equity financing. The General Assembly allowed the move last year.

Also disclosed in the earnings call, the blades for the wind turbines will be constructed in Denmark, at a recently completed facility. Previous plans called for the blades to be built in Portsmouth but the $200 million, 310-job development missed project milestones and ultimately fell through.

In January, the project received both the wind farm’s construction plan and received a permit from the US Army Corps of Engineers for the onshore sections of the project.

Correction: A correction was made on Feb. 23, 2024: Due to a reporting error, an earlier version of this article misstated the date of the beginning of construction for the project. The offshore wind farm is slated to begin construction in May.

Ian Munro, 757-447-4097, [email protected]

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A paper was published observing a correlation between the red wolf’s decline and increases in many of the animals the wolves hunt. In the peer-reviewed journal Animal Conservation, scientists said that correlation suggests that even a small population of red wolves, like the one that persists at Alligator River and nearby Pocosin Lakes in northeastern North Carolina, can have a noticeable impact on the broader ecosystem.

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  1. Understanding Project Environment: Its Definition & Significance

    Summary: The project environment describes the totality of all internal and external influencing factors that have an impact on a project and significantly influence its success. Therefore, a detailed analysis and control of the project environment is essential for the successful management of a project. The Project Environment in Detail

  2. How to Manage Project Environment from Initiation to Close

    A project environment is all the internal and external forces that exert on your project management. These are things from inside and outside the project that can impact your schedule, budget, team morale and much more.

  3. What is Project Environment?

    Project EnvironmentThe influence of infrastructure and facility building on the physical environment is becoming more recognized and concerned. Fortunately, today's technical disciplines in charge of such work are becoming more aware of the need to mitigate the negative effects of their undertakings. The Project Manager, too, must be concerned with the project's technology and manage it ...

  4. What is Project Environment in Project Management

    What is the Project Environment? 2. 1. Social and cultural environment 3. 2. Physical environment 4. 3. Political environment View more Every Project Manager aims to deliver a successful project. But it is not an easy task. There are constraints of time and budget.

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    The project environment is composed of two components - internal and external, which are described in detail in the following sections. 3.2.1 Internal Environment The internal environment in which a project is developed consists of the factors that are internal to the organization, but outside the project itself.

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    Luka Bogavac December 12, 2022 Table of Contents What are the types of project environments? Type #1: External environment Type #2: Internal environment What is a project environment analysis? Project environment analysis methods Conclusion: Being aware of your project environment improves your chances of success

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    Delivering a project that has global impacts is much more challenging than delivering a project that only impacts the local environment. Of all the factors, the physical ones are the easiest to understand, and it is the cultural and global factors that are often misunderstood or ignored.

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    A TAXONOMY HELPS CLARIFY our thinking by classifying things neatly into groups and subgroups based on their similarities and relationships. With that in mind, let's break down the effective project management environment into its components and the steps that support that component. Effective project management relies on five components ...

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    What is the project environment analysis? PUMA assesses the entire environment of a project, i.e. all influencing factors that are relevant for the success of the project. Influencing factors include, for example: project management and the individual project teams, the client and his interests, the project risks and the measures to control them,

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    14 innovative projects helping to save the planet and make the world a better place Jan 13, 2021 UpLink helps communities across the world face the threats of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. Image: Unsplash/Noah Buscher Natalie Marchant Writer, Forum Agenda Our Impact What's the World Economic Forum doing to accelerate action on COVID-19?

  13. Back to Basics (Part 9): Project Environment Analysis with PESTLE

    The PESTLE analysis. PESTLE is an acronym for the various factors which surround a project's environment: The analysis is also known as PESTEL or PEST, depending on how many environmental factors are included. This method takes a big picture or birds view approach, which means that it looks at the project in a wider context and takes into ...

  14. Forests to be planted, wetlands restored near Columbia park

    The site of a wetland restoration project around Mill Creek in Richland County on Thursday, February 22, 2024. This project will offset the wetlands lost to developing the new Scout Motors ...

  15. Capturing Lessons Learned in Project Management [2023] • Asana

    Step 1: Send lessons learned survey. Immediately after the project is completed—or at the end of a significant project phase for larger initiatives—send a lessons learned survey to every project team member. This way, you're capturing feedback while it's still fresh in everyone's mind.

  16. Consider the Project Environment

    Executives, project managers, and people in every walk of life are on the front lines of creating a livable environment. Pay attention to the health of the physical, social and governance factors in and around your projects. Together these factors combine to form an environment which significantly influences the ability to sustain optimal performance. This […]

  17. PDF Managing the Project Environment

    What is the project environment? Today, there is a growing awareness and concern for the impact of infrastructure and facility construction on the physical environment. Fortunately, today's technological disciplines responsible for such work are becoming attuned to the idea of mitigating the adverse impacts of their projects.

  18. The Project Environment

    The Project Environment Last Updated on Wed, 17 Jan 2024 | Software Project The project environment artifacts evolve through three discrete states: the prototyping environment, the development environment, and the maintenance environment. 1.

  19. Project Environment and Context

    While having a clearly defined set of objectives, work scope, budget, and schedule is essential to being able to plan, implement, and control a project, if the project management team do not fully understand their project environment and context, the project will, in all likelihood, be doomed to failure.

  20. Understanding the Project Environment for Success

    The internal environment of a project is all about what's happening within the organization. It's like the foundation on which your project is built. For example: Processes and Tools: Every organization has its own way of doing things. These processes, tools, and methodologies are like the building blocks of your project.

  21. Project Management: Understanding the Project Environment

    Understanding the Project Environment There are many factors that need to be understood within your project environment (Figure 2.7). At one level, you need to think in terms of the cultural and social environments (i.e., people, demographics, and education).

  22. Understanding the Project Environment

    Understanding the Project Environment 19 January, 2016 - 17:35 Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. There are many factors that need to be understood within your project environment ( Figure 2.7 The important factors to consider within the project environment. ).

  23. APM PMQ The Project Environment

    The environment is the driving force for the project. It is important for the project manager to understand how these drivers are likely to influence the project. It may impact how they deliver the project, what they deliver, who is involved, and when it needs to be delivered. Early on in the project, the answers to some of these questions may ...

  24. The Project Environment

    Project-work encompasses strategic investments that enable assets, structures, systems, activities, and capabilities to be formed, maintained, or enhanced so that the organizational plans and ambitions can be realized. Organizational Change Organizational change is introduced through projects, programmes, and portfolios to deliver business value.

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  27. To Save San Francisco, a Democrat Wants to Scrap Environmental Reviews

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  28. Dominion seeks to sell 50% share of Virginia ...

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