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I am starting a project of going through the 6th Edition of the PMBOK® Guide and blogging about its contents.    The 6th Edition was released on September 22nd by the Project Management Institute, and now that I am done reviewing the first three chapters on projects, the environment in which they are done, and the role of the project manager, I am excited to start the fourth chapter on the first of the 10 knowledge areas, that of Project Integration Management.   This post starts a series of posts on the first project management process, process 4.1 Develop Project Charter.

In a previous post, I answered some general questions people have on the process itself.  Now I am going into the details of the inputs to this process.   Here are the four inputs to the process 4.1 Develop Project Charter

1. Business documents
2. Agreements
3. Enterprise environmental factors
4. Organizational process assets

The last two inputs are generic inputs you see with many project management processes; I won’t spend a lot of time on them.   The second input, Agreements, is for when you are doing a project for an external organization.   “Agreements” are the PMI term of art for legal contracts.   That input is the subject of today’s post.

Agreements are contracts which are mutually binding that obligate the seller to provide the specified products, service, or result (this is specified in the statement of work).   In exchange, the buyer will compensate the seller for the work done.

This input is optional, that is, it only exists if the project is being done for the external customer.   If the project is being done for the organization itself, then the statement of work will be supplied separately, usually in the business case document.

In the agreement, the following components may appear (the entire list is on p. 489 of the Guide):

• Procurement statement of work (narrative description of the product, service, or result that needs to be produced by the project)
• Time constraints (schedule deadlines)
• Pricing and payment terms
• Change request handling procedures
• Inspection, quality, and acceptance criteria

These are the key components:   for example, the “inspection, quality, and acceptance criteria” will specify what the objective basis will be for the customer to finally accept the product the project is designed to produce.

The other two inputs, EEFs (environmental enterprise factors) and OPAs (organizational process assets), are more generic and will not be discussed in a separate post.

Next, we will discuss the tools & techniques used to carry out the process 4.1 Develop Project Charter once the inputs have been gathered…

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