Project Management

Project Management

Project: Unique, large, one-time operation designed to accomplish a specific objective in a limited time frame. Projects may involve considerable cost. Some have a long time horizon, and some involve a large number of activities that must be carefully planned and coordinated.

The project approach enables an organization to focus attention and concentration effects on accomplishing a narrow set of performance objectives within a limited time and budget framework.

Performance goals: For a project; keeping the project within schedule, budget and quality guidelines.

The problems of planning and coordinating project activities can be formidable for large projects, which typically have thousands a=of activities that must be carefully planned and monitored if the project is to proceed according to schedule and at a reasonable cost.

 Projects go through a series of stages or phases, a life cycle, which include project initiation (conception, feasibility), planning, scheduling, execution, control and closeout.

A project is influenced by the company's strategy and policies, and environment. Deciding which project to implement is called project portfolio selection. This involves factors such as budget, availability of personnel with appropriate knowledge and skill, cost-benefit considerations, and financial benefits.

Matrix organization: Temporarily groups together specialists from different departments to work on special projects.

Project manager: person responsible for planning, scheduling, executing and controlling a project from inception to completion; meeting the project's requirements and ensuring completion on time, within budget and to the required quality standards. The project manager bears the ultimate responsibility for the success or failure of the project.

To effectively manage a project, a project manager must employ a certain set of skills

• Ability to motivate and direct team members
• Make trade-off decisions
• Expedite work when necessary
• Deal with obstacles
• Team conflict
• Put on fires and solve problems
• Handle failure
• Monitor time and budget

Project planning: involves further elaboration of the project scope including breaking down the project into smaller components, risk management planning, estimating the required resources for the activities, cost estimation and budgeting, human resources planning, project scheduling, communications planning, purchase planning.

Risk management planning: Risk are inherent in projects. Although careful planning can reduce risks, no amount of planning can eliminate chance events due to unforeseen or uncontrollable circumstances. Good risk management entails identifying as many potential risks as possible, analyzing and assessing those risks and planning a response to avoid, transfer or mitigate the risk.

Work breakdown structure (WBS): A hierarchical listing of what must be done during a project. The work breakdown structure is the basis for developing time and cost estimates.

Project scheduling: Determining the timing of activities of the project. It starts with the identification of the activities in the WBS, including their attributes, and whether an activity is a milestones activity. Then any sequential dependencies of every pair of activities should be identifies. Next the resources needed for each activity should be identified. If the needed resources cannot be identified, the activity should be further decomposed.

The duration of each activity can be estimated using information on the availability of resources. The risk register could possibly add some contingency time to the duration. As work is undertaken, more accurate estimates of costs and times become available.

Grantt Chart: A schedule Grantt chart is very simple. Grantt charts fail to reveal relationships among activities that can be crucial to effective project management.

PERT/CPM Technique:

• PERT: Program evaluation and review technique, used for scheduling and control of large projects.
• CRM: Critical path method used for scheduling and control of large projects

1. Graphical display of project activities and their sequential relationship
2. An estimate of how long the project will take
3. An indication of which activities are most critical to timely project completion
4. An indication of how long any activity can be delayed without delaying the project

Precedence network: Diagram of project activities and their sequential relationships by use of arrows and nodes The network has a start node, S, which is actually not an activity but is added in order to have a single starting node. The network should have only one ending node.