Project management is heavily reliant on successful planning, and the Planning Process Group is an integral part of descriptive development approaches and lifecycles. Do not confuse it with the planning performance domain in the PMBOK 7.
However, the rise of agile development approaches has led to the introduction of project management principles and system for value delivery to replace process groups. Furthermore, knowledge areas are substituted by performance domains and tailoring processes as part of the project's body of knowledge. To be sure, process groups still play a major role in predictive lifecycles, but the importance of the planning performance domain cannot be understated.
Once the Initiating Processes have been finalized, the Planning Process Group comes into play, allowing us to go into further detail. It comprises processes that create instructions to execute project goals and tasks within the project's scope, while also determining the best course of action to reach said goals. Therefore, the Planning Process Group is an indispensable component of project management, not just in the form of exam preparation, but also as a key element of the entire project management approach. In other words, a project's success should always be premeditated.
If you are an expert in anything, you cannot effectively execute it if you don't have a plan because you will get many challenges in real time, and you need to have an effective plan, effective strategy in place to handle these real-time challenges. Therefore, we should spend time on planning, and in the context of project management, all activities are planned.
Everything we have already gone through all this and knowledge areas, so you have already seen that in all knowledge areas we have a sub-activity for planning, and all those activities are coming together in the planning process group. So whether it was risk management, schedule management, or stakeholder management, in all knowledge areas, we had planning. All of them will be applied here. They will come together as a unit in terms of sequential activities which you as a project manager are expected to perform to create a comprehensive plan for all the activities you are going to perform in a project. So you don't have to leave anything out. If you are going to perform, let's say, procurement management in this project, you need to create that plan here. And we are not executing anything; we are creating the plan. So remember that. So let's say when we say plan risk response, we are not executing our risk responses. You are simply planning our risk response, and it's a very comprehensive process.
We have to perform a lot of things, a lot of planning for successful projects. So we are going to develop our project management plan. We have to plan our scope management. We have to plan our requirement collections. We need to define scope. We need to create the blueprints. We need to define activities. We need to plan schedule management, sequence activities, estimate activity duration, develop schedule, plan cost management, estimate cost, determine budget, plan quality management, plan resource management, estimate activity resources, plan communication management, plan risk management, identify risk, perform qualitative risk analysis, perform quantitative risk analysis, plan risk responses, plan procurement management, plan stakeholder management.
You can see that we have lifted planned sub-activities, planned process, from all the knowledge areas, and there are additional activities also, like create WBS. You cannot have effective planning if you don't understand the work you are going to do. So WBS will help you by providing you information about the actual activities. So a WBS creation is the process where you subdivide the work into smaller pieces. So these smaller pieces will provide the information about not only the budget, but it will also help you with requirement management, their scope management. You can come up with the sequence of the activity, which can later help you with schedule management. You can identify any procurement if you need. You can identify your communication management requirements, any risks associated with those work. So when you start to plan a project, you need to move step by step. So let's say you get a one-line problem statement. That problem statement is further processed in the initiating process group to produce a project charter and other documents which you have seen in the last video. Now that project charter will help us drive it further. So let's get back to our project charter and take it from there.
The first section here represents the problem statements. Let's quickly go through it. ABC corporation is looking to automate the correspondence process for the software application CDE. This is an application they already have. Customer service agents use CD system to process the new application, but to mail the confirmation letter, they manually print the letter and mail it to the customer. So, probably, and they export data from the system manually or copy/paste it, then use the printer to print those letters and mail it. The current process is a manual control which requires the processor to select the proper template and manually copy the required information from CD. So as I mentioned, we are manually copying the information and as the company usually has a lot of templates, it's again a big process for the operator to go through all these templates, select the appropriate one, and then print it. At this stage, our information is that this is the problem statement and then we have objectives, what should be done for the project, we have high-level requirements, etc. So we have that information.
So we have requirements to plan our scope, we have high-level requirements to plan our requirement collection, which business analysts will be performed to get functional requirements, non-functional requirements, transitional requirements. If I'm not sure about the business analysis side, I have a course on business analysis, so you can use that. Requirements management and business analysis itself is a very comprehensive activity. So we'll basically include details about how we are going to gather requirements, their dates, and things like that. So that information is used by the project manager to perform all of these activities. Being, for example, we had high-level requirements and we had a high-level budget. So requirements, budgets, that is going to help you with the scope, requirement collection, schedule, risk, procurement if any needed. So you will use that information to perform all of these activities. And after completing your planning, you need to get down with execution.