Project Management in a Nutshell - Essay Example

Project Management Introduction: When we think about thee principles and techniques of the project management then we usually associate them with themanagement of people. The management of people includes defining what the business unit will do, planning the number and type of staff who will do it, organizing the staff, monitoring their performance of the tasks assigned them, and finally bringing a close to their efforts. Those same principles and techniques also apply to the projects. Project management is a method and a set of techniques based on the accepted principles of management used for planning, estimating, and controlling work activities to reach a designed end result on time within the budget and according to specification. There is no single factor that makes a project successful. There is a series of successful steps, a sequence of successful steps that leads to a project towards a successful project. We will discuss these factors in detail. Key Factors for Success in Running Successful Projects I think the following factors play an important role in the success of any project. Project Planning: How often have you heard it said that planning is waste of time? No sooner is the plan completed than someone comes along to change it. These same naysayers would also argue that the plan, once completed is disregarded and merely put on the shelf so the team can get down to doing some real work. In people management, the planning activity involves deciding on the types of people resources that will be needed to discharge the responsibilities of the department. That means identifying the types of skills needed and the number of people possessing those skills. Project planning is a basic technique of Project Management that gives us a summary of whole the project. For example how many people needed for this project, how much resources we required, how much time we need, how we can manage the time and resources? All these questions are handled in the project planning. In other words we do project planning for making getting the answers of above questions. So project planning makes a project successful. Without proper planning a project can not achieve success. There is a successful planning behind every successful project. The key to a winning project is in the planning. Forming a project plan is the first thing managers should do when taking responsibility of any kind of project. Often project planning is disregarded in for saving time. However, many people fail to recognize the significance of a project plan in saving time, money and many problems. There are many software applications for project planning easily available in markets. We should use that software for implementation of our planning. The problems in software development projects are approximately always bad code and missed deadlines. In the result, they do not get higher quality and output. These indications may in turn have been caused by bad planning. They motivate typical responses including more complicated planning and a reduction of limitations on the developers capability to manage. When this becomes a recurring example, projects undergo. Moreover they become too crowded to even breathe, or at the very least they undergo reduced skill to work at peak capacity. The most important of all is that only a plan helps to managers in getting a rough approximation at least of how much time and money the course of action would take. Below are some advantages of planning: 1. Planning defines what manager has to do and what not. 2. Planning offers a rough estimate of time and money that is required to complete the project. 3. Planning also covers money matters deeply and handles expenses involved in the project. 4. Planning also assists managers to get ready for urgent situations that may happen at some stage in the course of the project. 5. Planning provides information to the managers about what is to be done every day, every week and every month. 6. Planning helps managers in managing the staff needed for project. 7. A plan gives a plain idea to personnel of their relevant role in the project. There should be short term plans as well as long term plans. At the same time managers should attempt to draft out emergency plans to deal with an emergency if it occurs. More often, developers failed to bring a suitable product or satisfactory results. The resulted dissatisfaction may be based upon so many factors like profitability, budget, timing, etc. When this took place, then management has limited choices to perform certain actions. It can put back or retrain developers if it believes that the developers be deficient in abilities. It can put focus upon more planning if it evaluates that the planning was deficient. And it can make tighter management controls to make sure that developers pursue the plan more strictly. When projects sprint into problems, planners also notice a comparatively limited number of causes. Sometimes Planners consider that marketing fated planning efforts right from the start by in advance promising features, techniques, and budget. They think that the planning course was quick, poorly budgeted, and with irritation managed by management. Planners think that the development group did not completely make use of their planning documentation and that management permitted them to deviate too far from the planned design. The project planning is indispensable. Not only is it a roadmap to how the work will be performed, but it is also a tool for decision making. The plan suggests alternative approaches, schedules, and resource requirements from which the project manager can select the best alternative. A complete plan will clearly state the tasks that need to bee done, why they are necessary, who will do what, when it will be completed, what resources will be needed, and what criteria must be met in order for the project to be declared complete and successful. There are three benefits to developing a project plan: 1. Even though we would never expect the project work to occur exactly as planned, planning the work allows us to consider the likely outcomes and to put the necessary corrective measures in place. 2. The mere act of planning gives us a better understanding of the goals and objectives of the projects. Even if we were to discard the plan, we would still benefit from having done the exercise. 3. Once we have defined the project plan and the necessary resources to carry out the plan, we can schedule the work to take advantage of resource availability. We also can schedule work in parallel; that is, we can do tasks concurrently rather than in series. By doing tasks concurrently we can shorten the total duration of the project. We can maximize our use of resources and complete the project work in less time than by taking other approaches. Project Scheduling: Like project planning, project scheduling also play an important role in the success of a project. It is also an important factor of project Management. A schedule comprises details of so many activities, record of a projects fatal elements with planned start and finish dates. Charts can be used in scheduling for instance; a Gantt chart presents a graphical representation of a project plan. Critical chain project management shows that terminal-element start dates and finish dates function as random variables, and offers managing a project not by its traditional plan but rather by using buffer management and a relay race mentality. Every project manager should develop a work breakdown structure earlier than the creation of project schedule. Work breakdown structure is an effort for each task and a resource list with accessibility for each resource. If these are not yet accessible, it may be promising to generate something that looks like a schedule, but it will basically be a work of creative writing. They can be formed using a consensus-driven inference technique like Wideband Delphi. The motive for this is that a schedule itself is an approximation: each date in the schedule is predictable, and if the dates do not have the buy-in of the personnel who are going to do the work, the schedule will be inexact. There are so many industries use scheduling for their projects and they have proper schedulers for performing this job. Engineering and construction, the development and management, and software development are the industries where schedule plays important role. With the passage of time methods of scheduling are well developed, they are erratically applied all the way through industry. Consistency and endorsement of scheduling best practices are rewarded by the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering (AACE), and the Project Management Institute (PMI). In many corporations, it is the responsibility of project control department to estimate the cost for project and also estimation of the risk for the project. Presently, there are so many projects scheduling software products are available in the markets which can do very much of the boring work of calculating the schedule automatically, and abundance of books and tutorials enthusiastic to teaching people how to use them. On the other hand, before using these tools, it is necessary for a project manager to understand the techniques at the back of the WBS, dependencies, resource allotment, critical paths, also Gantt charts and earned value. These are the actual keys to planning and scheduling a successful project. There are so many tools easily available in the markets but the mostly used tool for creating a small project schedule is Microsoft Project. The business standard for logic driven dynamic scheduling is Primavera Project Planner which is shortly known as P3. There are also so many others free of charge and open source project scheduling tools existing for most domains which feature task lists, resource allocation, predecessors and Gantt charts. Some project scheduling tools include: 1. Dot Project 2. Gantt Project 3. Open workbench 4. TUTOS etc. Product Breakdown Structures: A Product Breakdown Structure is also an important factor that is used for large size projects. It is a results-oriented family tree that imprisons all the components of a product in a prearranged way.  It is often represents graphically as a hierarchical tree; on the other hand, it can also be represented in a tabular list of elements classes and tasks or the concave task list that appears in the Gantt chart scheduled. Normally this technique is used to manage large and compound projects. It breaks them into more and more pieces until they are a collected works of defined "work packages" that may include a number of tasks. If we talk about project management, a product breakdown structure is a comprehensive, hierarchical tree structure of elements that make up an item, arranged in whole-part affiliation. It is helpful in clarifying what is to be distributed by the project and can help construct a work breakdown structure. The Prince2 is a method of project management which authorizes the use of product based scheduling, part of which is increasing a product breakdown structures. Below is an example of Product breakdown Structure for the monitor: Use of Milestones: In project management, a milestone is an incurable element that symbols the completion of a work package or stage, normally marked by a high level event such as completion, backing or signing of a deliverable. Besides to signaling the completion of a key deliverable, a milestone may be suggesting a significant decision or the origin of a critical piece of information, which draw round or affects the future of a project. In this case, a milestone not only indicates distance traveled but also points to direction of travel since key decisions made at milestones may modify the route through the project plan. Whether it is a deliverable or a decision, a milestone plays an important role in the project; it should not be used to pass on to in-between tasks, even when these are serious to the result of the project. While there is no accurate number of milestones between them, they drop their worth as communication points when there are too many or too few. There should be far fewer milestones as compare to deliverables or work packages, but there should be sufficient milestones to measure whether or not the project is taking place as planned at major gaps. It is important not to puzzle milestones with manifold unrelated metrics. A milestone is a remarkable key event in mounting a logical phase. Milestones also put in considerable value to project scheduling. When it is united with a stylish scheduling methodology such as Pert, then milestones permits project management to much more exactly settle on whether or not the project is on schedule. By restraining the dates related with milestones, the critical path can be resolute for most important schedule intervals in addition to the whole project. Slack can also be measured on each planned gap. This partition of the project planning into intervals permits former suggestion of schedule problems and an improved view into the actions whose completion is critical to the project timeline. Milestones are used to observe progress of the project, but there are restrictions to their usefulness. They demonstrate evolution only on the critical path, and pay no attention to non-critical actions. It is not unusual for resources to be moved from non-critical activities to critical activities to make sure that milestones are met. This gives the notion that the project is on schedule when in fact some activities are being disused. The best technique to measure evolution is by using Earned Value Analysis. This records how much work in total should be executed each day transversely the whole project, and calculates how much has been achieved, thus viewing progress for the project as a whole. Project Reporting: Project reporting is most important when you are dealing with high budget project. For projects concerning more than trivial cash you will need a spreadsheet to map and report planned and genuine expenditure. You can use Microsoft Excel or related applications for this process. If you dont know how to put jointly a fundamental financial plan, try to get some assistance from someone who does, and make sure you bring a good friendly, elastic fiscal person into your team, its an important purpose of project management, and if you cant supervise the financial procedures your self you necessitate to be talented to rely entirely on whoever does it for you. The worksheet must facilitate you to plan, manage and report the thorough finances of your project. Produce a cost line for major expenses action, and split this down into individual components. Make a system for assigning inward invoices to the correct activities, and presenting when the costs strike the project account. Set up clear payment terms with all contractors and attach to them. Use of Charts: Gantt Charts: These are tremendously helpful project management tools. A Gantt chart can be constructed by using Microsoft Excel or a similar spreadsheet. Every action has a disconnect line. Generate a time-line for the period of the project. You can manage review and break points. At the end of each line you can demonstrate as many cost columns for the actions as you want. A Gantt chart can be used to remain track of advancement for each action and how the costs are successively. You can shift the time chunks approximately to report on actual against planned, and to rearrange, and to produce new plan bring up to date. Costs columns can demonstrate plan and actual and changes, and measures no matter what totals, averages, ratios, etc you need. Gantt Charts are the most stretchy and helpful of all project management tools, but they do not illustrate the significance and inter-dependence of associated parallel actions, and they wont illustrate the needs to complete one job before another can begin, as a critical path investigation will do, so you require both tools, particularly at the planning step. Below is an example of Gantt chart: Figure 1 Example of Gantt chart Image is taken from: www.businessballs.com Pert Chart: A Pert chart is a graphic demonstration of a project’s schedule, which shows the series of tasks, which tasks can be performed at the same time, and the critical path of jobs that must be finished on time in order for the project to meet its completion deadline. The chart can be created with a range of attributes, such as initial and latest start dates for each job, earliest and latest completion dates for each task, and loose time between tasks. A Pert chart can document a whole project or an important segment of a project. The chart permits a team to keep away from impractical timetables and schedule prospect, to help recognize and cut down tasks that are blockage, and to center thought on most critical tasks. Because it is first and foremost a project-management tool, a pert chart is most helpful for preparation and follow entire projects or for scheduling and tracking the completed segment of a scheduling. Baseline Plans: After the analysis of project requirements and documentation, the project planning baseline established for scope, cost, and timetable, project implementation and management of activities can instigate. Baseline Plans engages application of conservative system control methods to the project effort. Taking into consideration the project attempt to be a process, the plans, specifications, resources, and different techniques are the inputs. The process outputs should be repeatedly checked and matched with the plan. Modifications in the process should be made to corroborate the project output to that most wanted. Discrepancy between project results and the plan should be reviewed and reported occasionally. For an under control project, it needs to be planned as a closed system. This can be done by creating baselines plan for scope, cost and schedule and then putting them beneath some form of version manage. Once the project has been controlled in these three extents, it can be deliberate, observed and controlled. If a project does not have such baseline supervision, it cannot be directed and taken as a closed system, and must be therefore measured to be out of management. No significant presentation measurements can be made where the scope, cost, and schedule are not delimited and under some form of change control restraints. If it turns out to be obvious that the project cannot be controlled to its baseline, fundamental changes may be necessary. These types of changes are made in to project scope or the understanding that the project plan is gravely faulty can make the baseline of dubious value for project control. In this situation, the project may have to be re-planned and established a base-line again. After the establishment of new baseline, the same technique of checking output and managing the process must be continued. Establishing the baseline plan is the recognized end of the planning phase and the starting of project implementation and control. Controlling the project baseline is extremely necessary to make project successful. Other than getting the wrong idea from the requirements, bad cost and schedule approximation, and technical complicatedness, the things that will most likely put in danger a project are the changes. It is very difficult to assess what has changed if you don’t know where you were to begin with. Understanding where you started, and documenting it, creates your baseline. This baseline is your financial plan, schedule, and project scope. After the preliminary iterative preparation process, the planning baselines must be frozen and place under pattern control. The significance of placing the scope and plan under version control cannot be vulgar. If you have version control, then you can determine the growth and status. Without version control, status and improvement measurements become worthless. A project devoid of a sure baseline plan is flying blind. Requirements move stealthily can drive costs and schedules further than their thresholds, and make changes in implementation of a haphazard fashion, or even many changes put into practice in a disciplined fashion, can produce bewilderment all the way through a project management. It is therefore significant to control the speed of change as well as the change process itself. Current requirements for changes to the project requirements may be indicative of an unfinished preliminary requirements analysis or the breakdown of the project team to effectively grip and communicate with users and customers early in the project effort. Use of Software Planning Tools: We are providing a list of Project Management tools. Different tools can be used in finding the project management solution that is right for your situation. The list includes: project management tools, project accounting, project estimating, project portfolio management, project scheduling, requirements management, and resource planning and scheduling software. One of the tools is Dot Project is worthy of special talk about. It is the most well-liked open source web-based project management tool. So many users, from software start ups, to building companies, to colleges, to large organizations have productively used dot Project software to supervise their projects. It is easy to use. It has web-based interface that supports features such as: project and task management, multi-user operation, Gantt charts, discussion forums, contact management, reporting, and calendar. More details about this tool can be obtained from the web site given below: http://infogoal.com/pmc/dot_project.htm Some tools are given below: Ace Project - Project Management: it is also a project management tool which presents web-based project management, also bug tracking and timesheet management. Other information can be obtained from its web site. Active Project® Project Management: it is also a web based project management and partnership tool. AdHoc Gantt Chart for Lotus Notes & Domino: It has an applet which is a unique component for Lotus Notes developers who are appearing for a true MS Project like project scheduling and resource planning tool for Lotus Notes and Domino. Bill -The Simplified Project Management Tool: It is used to manage your projects from anywhere. It allows you to check the progress of your projects in real time. Assess the cost-effectiveness of your projects with a single click Bill Quick: It is a reasonably priced, easy to use Time Tracking, Project Management & Billing solution. Limitless employee, task & project bill rates. Bill Quick holds any billing collections. Managing Risk: Risk management is a very important factor that plays an important role in the success of any project. Risk Management is a controlled technique for organization uncertainty through, risk assessment, rising strategies to administer it, and alleviation of risk using managerial resources. The plans comprise transferring the risk to another party, keep away from the risk, plummeting the unenthusiastic effect of the risk, and accepting some or all of the results of a fastidious risk. Purpose of managing the risk is to decrease different risks associated to a reselected domain to the level acknowledged by the general public. It may refer to frequent types of intimidation caused by environment, technology, humans, organizations and politics. In project management, risk management comprises the following actions: Planning how risk management will be detained in the exacting project. Plan should comprise risk management tasks, responsibilities, activities and budget. Assigning a risk officer as a team member other than a project manager who is accountable for predicting prospective project problems. Distinctive characteristic of risk officer is a strong cynicism. Each risk should have the following attributes: opening date, title, short explanation, likelihood and significance. Optionally a risk may have an assigned person accountable for its decree and a date by which the risk must be resolved. Each team member should have likelihood to report risk that he noticed in the project. Arranging alleviation plans for risks that are selected to be mitigated. The purpose of the mitigation plan is to explain how this fastidious risk will be hold. What, when, by who and how will it be done to keep away from it or reduce results if it becomes a responsibility. Shortening planned and faced risks, usefulness of mitigation activities, and effort exhausted for the risk management. Risk management is basically a practice of analytically choosing cost effective techniques for reducing the effect of risk realization to the organization. All risks can never be fully keep away from or mitigated purely because of fiscal and practical restrictions. As a result all organizations have to admit some level of outstanding risks. Managing the Change: Here are some policies or regulations for efficient management of change. Managing change will be more victorious if you apply these simple values. Accomplishing personal change will be more victorious too if you use the same technique where relevant. Change management involves considerate planning and responsive implementation, and above all, discussion with, and participation of, the people exaggerated by the changes. If you strength change on people usually problems occur. Change must be sensible, attainable and quantifiable. These features are especially pertinent to managing personal change. Before starting organizational change, ask yourself: What do we want to attain with this change, why, and how will we know that the change has been attained? Who is exaggerated by this change, and how will they act in response to it? How much of this change can we attain ourselves, and what fractions of the change do we need help with? These features also narrate powerfully to the management of personal as well as organizational change. Do not sell change to people as a mean of hasten conformity and execution. Selling change to people is not a sustainable policy for victory, except your aspire is to be bitten on the bum at some time in the prospect when you least anticipate it. When people listen to a management well-known selling them a change, civilized assiduous folk will normally smile and come into view to consent, but silently to themselves, they are judging. As an alternative, change needs to be understood and controlled in a mode that people can deal with successfully with it. Change can be worrying, so the manager logically needs to be a settling pressure. The employee does not have a blame to supervise change, the employees liability is no other than to do their best, which is different for every person and depends on a broad range of factors (health, maturity, constancy, practice, personality, incentive, etc). Liability for supervising change is with management and executives of the organization. They must manage the change in a mode that employees can survive with it. The manager has a duty to make possible and enable change, and all that is implied within that statement, particularly to understand the circumstances from an objective point of view and then to help people understand reasons, aims, and ways of responding positively according to employees own situations and capabilities. Progressively more the managers role is to infer, communicate and facilitate not to teach and force, which nobody really reacts to well. Strong confrontation to change is often entrenched in intensely conditioned or historically unbreakable feelings. Endurance and tolerance is necessary to assist people in these situations to see things in a different way. People who greet change are not usually the best at being talented to work consistently, reliably and follow processes. Many industries and disciplines have a high attentiveness of employees who need a strong dependability character profile, for instance, health services and nursing, administration, public sector and government departments, utilities and services; these divisions will be likely to have many personnel with character profiles who find change difficult. Be aware of peoples strengths and weaknesses. Not everyone salutation change. Take the time to recognize the people you are dealing with, and how and why they feel like they do, before you take exploit. Conclusion: A project is a name of many combined activities. So the success of a project depends upon the success of those activities. All the activities should be considered seriously for getting high quality results. Project Planning is the most important factor that leads a project towards success if successfully implemented. We have also discussed other factors such as project scheduling, reporting and risk management. Reference: Heerkens, Gary. (2001). Project Management (The Briefcase Book Series). McGraw-Hill. Kerzner, Harold. (2003). Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling, 8th Ed., Wiley. Chamoun, Yamal. (2006). Professional Project Management, The Guide, 1st.Edition, Monterrey, NL MEXICO: McGraw Hill. Lewis, James. (2002). Fundamentals of Project Management, 2nd ed., American Management Association. Meredith, Jack R. and Mantel, Samuel J. (2002). Project Management : A Managerial Approach, 5th ed., Wiley.   . Read More