Managing effective projects

Managing effective projects

1. Defining and Organizing Projects

   • Defining the scope and objectives of a porject
     • Project objective statement
       • Concrete outcomes of the project
         • Scope creep
           • Changes to the scope , which sufficient quantity are primary causes of failed projects
   • Selecting the project manager and team
     • Facilitator
       • Must resolve conflicts between individuals or departments to ensure that the project has appropriate resources. Good leadership skill and a systems view.
     • Communicator
       • Additional resources must be clearly communicated to senior management and other stakeholders in the project. Frequently communicate with the project team
     • Decision Maker
       • Organiza the team mettings, specify how the team will make decisions, and determine the nature and timing of reports to senior management
     • Selecting the project team
       • Technical competences
         • Technical competences required for the task
       • Sensitivity
         • Be sensitive to interpersonal conflicts that may arise
       • Dedication
         • should feel comfotable solving project problems
   • Recognizing Organizational Structure
     • Functional
       • The project is housed in a specific department or functional area.
     • Pure Project
       • Team memebers work exclusively for the project manager on a particular project. This structure simplifies the line of authority. Effective for large projects.
     • Matrix
       • Compromise between the functional and pure project structures. Allows each functional area to mantain over who works on a project and the technology that is used.
   • Planning projects
     • Defining the work breakdown structure
       • Statement of all work that has to be completed. Project manager must work closely with the team to identify all activities. An activity is the smallest unit of work effort consuming both time and resources that the project manager can schedule and control. Each activity in the WBS must have an "owner" who is responsible for doing the work
     • Diagramming the network
       • PERT/CPM
         • Considering projects as networks forces porject teams to identify and organize the data required and to identify the interrelationships between activities. Networks enable project managers to estimate the completion time of projects, an advantage that can be useful planning other events. Reports highlight of the activities that are crucial to completing projects on the schedule. Network enable project managers to analyze the time and cost implications of resource trade-offs
       • Establishing precedence relationships
         • Determines a sequence for undertaking activities ; it specifies that one activity cannot start until a preceding activity has been completed.
       • Estimating Activity Times
         • When the same activity has been done many times before, time estimates will have a relatively high degree of certainity.
       • Using the activity on-node approach
         • Nodes represent activities and arcs represent the precedence relationships between them
     • Developing the schedule
       • Managers can estimate the completion time of a project by finding the critical path, identify the start and finish times for each activity for a project schedule and calculate the amount of slack time for each activity
         • Critical Path
           • It is the sequence of activities between a porject's start and finish that takes the longest time to complete
         • Project schedule
           • Earliest start and earliest finish times
             • Earliest start time (ES)is the earliest finish time of the immediately preceding activity.
             • Earliest finish time (EF) of an activity is the earliest finish time of the inmedaitely preceding activity.
           • Latest start and latst finish times
             • Latest finish time (LF) for an activity is the latest start time of the activity that immediately follows
             • The latest start time (LS) for an activity equals its latest finish time minus its estimated duration.
           • Activity slack
             • Maximum lenght of time that an activity can be delayed without delaying the entire project.
           • Gantt chart
             • A project schedule usually created by the project manager using a computes software, that superimposes porject activities, with their precedence relationships and estimated duration times, on a time line.
     • Analyzing Cost-Time Trade Offs
       • Keeping costs at accepatable levels is almost always as important as meeting schedule dates.
         • Total project costs are the sum of direct costs (labor, materials and any other costs related to proejct activities), indirect costs (administration, depreciation, financial, and other variable overhead costs that can be avoided by reducting total project time) and penalty costs (if a porject extends).
           • Cost crash
             • Normal time (NT) is te time necessary to complete an activity under normal conditions
             • The normal cost (NC) is the activity cost associated with the normal time.
             • The crash time (CT) is the shortest possible time to complete an activity.
             • The crash cost (CC) is the activity cost associated with the crash time.
           • Minimizing costs
             • Schedule determined by starting with the normal time schedule and crashing activities along the critical path, in such a way that the costs of crashin do not exceed the savings in indirect and penalty costs
               • 1. Determine the projects critical path
                 • 2. Find the activity or activities on the critical path with the lowest cost of crashing per week.
                   • 3. Reduce the time for this activity until it cannot be further reduced, another path becomes critical, or the increase in direct costs exceeds the indirect and penalty cost savings that result from shortening the project.
                     • 4. Repeat this procedure until the increase in direct costs is larger than the savings generated by shortening the project
     • Assessing risks
       • Risk is a measure of the probability and consequence of not reaching a defined project goal
         • Risk management plans
           • A plan that identifies the key risks to a project's success and prescribes ways to circumvent them
             • Strategic Fit
               • The project may not be a good strategic fit in that it may not be clearly linked to the strategic goals of the firm.
             • Service/Product attributes.
               • If the project involves the development of a new service or product, there may be market, technological, or legal risks
             • Project team capability
               • The project team may not have the capability to complete the project succesfully because of the size and complexity of the project or the technology involved
             • Operations
               • there may be an operations risk because of poor information accuracy, lack of communication, missing precedence relationships, or bad estimates for activity times
           • Simulations
             • PERT/CPM networks can be used to quantify risks associated with project timing.
           • Statistical Analysis
             • Opritmistic time is the shortest time in which an activity can be completed. The most likely time is the probable time required to perform an activity. The pessimistic time is the longest estimated time required to perfrom an activity
               • Analyzing Probabilities
                 • To develop the probability distribution for project completion time, we assume that the duration time of one activity does not depend on that of any other activity
               • Near critical paths
                 • Paths that are close to the same duration as critical path may ultimately become the critical path over the life of the project

2. Monotoring and controlling projects

   • Monitoring porject status
     • Open issues and risks
       • The tracking system should remind the project manager of due dates for open issues and who was responsible for seeing that they are solved. It also should provide
     • Schedule status
       • A tracking system that provides periodic monitoring of slack time in the project schedule can help the project manager control activities along the critical path.
   • Monitoring project resources
     • Projects life cycle: definition and organization, planning, execution and close out.
       • Resource leveling. The attempt to reduce the peaks and valleys in resource needs by shifting the chedules of conflicting activities within their earliest and latest start dates.
       • Resource allocation.The assignment of resources to the most important activities
       • Resource acquisition. The addition of more of an overloaded resource to mantain the schedule of an activity.
   • Controlling projects
     • Project managers have the responsibilities of accounting for the effective use of the firm´s resources as well as managing the activir¿ties to achieve the time and quality goals of the project.