Week 12 - Chapter 11 - Project Management

Weekly Questions - Project Management

Explain the triple constraint and its importance in project management.

Project Management is the act of organizing resources such as scope, time and cost to bring about a desired result. The triple constraint involves making tradeoffs between scope, time and cost for a project, this is used to analyse whether a projects objectives and goals are being met. It is inevitable in a project life cycle that there will be changes to the scope, time or cost of the project. Time, cost and scope are interdependent. All projects are limited in some way by these three constraints, you cannot change one variable without changing the others. If you increase the timeline of the project, costs will likely increase and scope will increase. Therefore, organisations need to plan adequately to ensure projects do not fail.

Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planning

PERT Chart (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) – Graphical representation of a project’s schedule, showing the sequence of tasks, the relationships between those tasks, such as, which tasks will be performed, and the completion of tasks.

Shows the relationships of different jobs in all the projects, the proceeding job and subsequent jobs, what identifies what jobs need to happen before other jobs start.

Available: http://img.brothersoft.com/screenshots/softimage/p/pert_chart_expert-88105-1.jpeg

Gantt Chart – a graphical representation of the duration of tasks against the progression of time (i.e calendar). In a Gantt chart, tasks are listed vertically and the project’s time frame is listed horizontally. A Gantt chart is a useful tool for planning and scheduling projects. A Gantt chart is also helpful when monitoring a project's progress.

- Shows the schedule of job completion, what jobs must be done before other jobs start, assigning resources and materials for each job and working out the cost of each jobs.

Available: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/InfoKits/infokit-related-files/Resources/Images/gantt-chart-viewable.

Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success.

1. Managing People – Ensuring conflict doesn’t arise within a team, balancing the needs of the project with the personal and professional needs of the team are two of the challenges facing project managers. Project mangers need to manage the development of the team.

2. Managing communications – project managers need to ensure communications within the organization is managed between functions to produce a project. The project manager distributes timely, accurate, and meaningful information regarding project objectives that involve time, cost, scope and quality. The use of planning and scheduling tools such as Microsoft Project, blogs and wikis are communication tools, to inform the team about the projects status.

3. Managing change – ensuring employees adapt to change and react appropriately will lead to a successful project completion.

Outline 2 reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects suceed.

Projects fail because:

- Failure to align project with organizational objectives.

- Unrealistic expectations. Expectations of an organization can be too high and thus an unachievable goal.

Projects succeed because:

- Project sponsorship at executive level.

- Good decision making structure, appropriate and realistic decisions and goals.