What are the Environmental Factors and the Organizational Process Assets of the PMBOK® Guide?

In this episode, Ricardo talks about two terms that appear very often throughout the PMBOK® Guide and usually generate a lot of questions from those who are starting in project management.

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five Minutes BM podcast today. I like to talk about two items that we see very, very often on the PMI. PMBOK Guide the first one is called in to work the price environmental factors. And the second one is the organizational process assets. We can see this as input in sero processes of the PMBOK Guide. And what do they mean most of the time? When you see that you can make a little bit of confusion, trying to understand first, what is supposed to be inside these two terms and what not the difference between them.

So lets try to explain. So what is the enterprise environmental factors? They are everything that you, of course around your project. Most of the time, they are soft things. For example, what to do the organizational culture on the project, what is the market place? What is this? The stake holder risk tolerance. How is the political climate for that project? What is the existing infrastructure that you may use to deliver this project?

Is this project geographically disperse, or it's only concentrated in a region or in a city or in an a or a department. So this are all this underlining aspects in making certain that your project it's a, and a pen depen has boiling water and all the cast around. So you need to understand that you cannot think only in your project as the food, because the food is surrounded by water.

That is surrounded by the Penn that is on the stove. So you need to understand that the heat that the stove provides will impact the directly your project. Then this is regarding the Environmental Factors your project is in on the other side. What does this organizational process assets to be really honest with you? I don't like this term because it would be much easier if we talk about lessons learned in a historical information, what are these Assets do you mean?

And basically the policies you have, the procedures you have, the knowledge base, the lessons learned and the historical information. So you need to understand that your project may be compared with previous projects, that you may have some lessons that you may use as an intern put, for example, to do a procurement process or to frame the scope of your project. So basically this organizational process assets, if you want to replace this one, the term by lessons learned historical information in all the policies and procedures need to very, very reasonable in most of the time.

Very easy to understand. So basically the understanding of this Environmental Factors plus all the historical information in the lessons learned would be to very relevant inputs, to several of what a process. For example, when you are doing the scope of your project, its very, very important that you understand the culture of your organization, the political climate we understand which kind of worth do you need to do.

It sounds important that you capture and compare your current project with previous projects, with historical information that our on this organizational process assets. So if you understand these two terms, it we'll be much easier for you to understand how the PMBOK Process flow happens. And it's a very, very important because sometimes these two concepts are quite tricky. So I hope you now understand better what I'm talking about and this will improve the success rate of what you are doing.

See you next week with another five minutes PM. Podcast.

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What are the Environmental Factors and the Organizational Process Assets of the PMBOK® Guide?

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