Page 155 - Project+

views of the project, which can be a great communication tool, and you can tailor the

views for your audience. For example, executives typically don’t want to see every line
in a project schedule. They are interested in milestone views or in seeing the major
deliverables and their due dates. The software will also allow you to save a baseline
schedule for historical reference. Let’s look at that next.

Setting the Baseline and Obtaining Approval

The schedule baseline is the final, approved version of the project schedule that

includes the baseline start and finish dates and resource assignments. It’s important
that you obtain sign-off on the project schedule from your stakeholders and the
functional managers who are supplying resources to the project. This ensures they
have read the schedule, understand the dates, and understand the resource
commitments. Ideally, it will also keep them from reneging on commitments they’ve

made and promises of resources at specific times on the project.

The schedule baseline will be used throughout the project to monitor progress. This
doesn’t mean that changes can never be made to the schedule. But we encourage you to
consider seriously any changes that will change the project end date. This will require
modifying the schedule baseline and obtaining approvals through a change
management process, which you’ll learn about in Chapter 9.

Quality Gates

Quality gates in the project schedule are similar to milestones. They don’t produce
something per se; they are used to determine quality checks at strategic points in the
project and ensure that the work is accurate and meets quality standards. In the
painting example, you may have a quality gate that occurs after the scraping is finished
but before the painting task begins. Painting should not begin until the quality gate is
verified. In this case, the quality gate is to assure the work has been performed

correctly and completely.

Your organization or PMO may have processes, checklists, or templates for use during
quality gates. The activities associated with quality gates are not usually unique to the
project; rather, they pertain to the product or service and can be used repeatedly on
multiple projects.

Establishing Governance Gates

Governance gates are used as approval points in the project. On large projects, they

can also be used as additional approval checkpoints or go/no-go decision points during
the project.

The CompTIA objectives list three governance gates: client sign-off, management
approval, and legislative approval. You learned about sponsor and stakeholder sign-
offs earlier. You’ll also want your customer to sign off on the project schedule (and the
project plan when completed) as well. Remember that sign-offs help assure adherence

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