Shariq Anis

Contents Project Background ................................................................................................................................... 2 Network Diagram ...................................................................................................................................... 2 Scheduled Tasks ........................................................................................................................................ 3 Proactive and Reactive Controls ............................................................................................................... 9 Accelerating Schedule ............................................................................................................................... 9 Risk Management ................................................................................................................................... 12 Project Planning ...................................................................................................................................... 12 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 13 References .............................................................................................................................................. 14 Project Background The Printer Drivers Project has scheduled list of 12 activities. Some of the activities are dependent on predecessor activities while others are independent. The goal of the project is to minimize the scheduled task's duration and ensure that activities that do not have any dependency may run in parallel for the early finish of the scheduled tasks. Details of the tasks with their expected start and finish dates are specified in the following scheduled task table. Network Diagram All Critical tasks are shown on the left marked in red while the blue tasks are non-critical. Each task has the start, and end dates and the total project duration is 115 days starting from- Looking at the enclosed chart helps in identification of Earliest Start (ES), Earliest Finish (EF), Latest Start (LS), Latest Finish (LF) and Slack/Float on each activity. Where the task is dependent on the single predecessor, the early start is dependent on duration of the predecessor, and where multiple dependencies are present, then the activity with the longest duration is taken into account for calculating the early start of that activity or based on the slack of predecessor or successor tasks. These details have been computed by MS Project. As it can be seen the longest two activities are writing software and program and test software. The write software activity has a slack while test software activity is the critical activity without any slack. It would be advised to build in slack in this activity as well to ensure that tasks are completed without delays and if any overruns are experienced than those can be catered for. As per Biafore (2013), a task’s Free Slack value describes that by how much can the task can be delayed before it starts affects another task. Further, the Total Slack shows that how much a task can be delayed before it affects the total project finish date. This helps in determining the critical path which is determined by charting activities that have a Total Slack of zero, where any delay in these tasks will affect the project finish date- thus these tasks are part of the critical path. Thus Critical Path constitutes a series of tasks that, if delayed, will push out the end date of a plan. Also, the Critical path is the shortest path from start to finish, incorporating all the tasks needed to complete the project (Chatfield and Johnson, 2013). The critical path activities are highlighted in red. Scheduled Tasks Task Name Printer Drivers Project P01 External specifications Early Start Early Finish Late Start Late Finish Thu 23-11-17 Free Slack 0 days Total Slack 0 days Fri 16-06-17 Thu 23-11-17 Fri 16-06-17 Fri 16-06-17 Tue 27-06-17 Fri 16-06-17 Wed 28-06-17 0 days 0 days P02 Review Design Features P03 Document new features P04 Write Software Wed 28-06-17 Thu 29-06-17 Wed 28-06-17 Fri 30-06-17 0 days 0 days Wed 28-06-17 Fri 30-06-17 Fri 15-09-17 Wed 20-09-17 0 days 57 days Wed 28-06-17 Tue 19-09-17 Wed 12-07-17 Wed 04-10-17 0 days 10 days P05 Program and test Fri 30-06-17 Thu 21-09-17 Fri 30-06-17 Fri 22-09-17 0 days 0 days P06 Edit and publish notes Mon 03-07-17 Tue 04-07-17 Wed 20-09-17 Fri 22-09-17 57 days 57 days P07 Review Manual Wed 20-09-17 Thu 21-09-17 Wed 04-10-17 Fri 06-10-17 0 days 10 days P08 Alpha site Fri 22-09-17 Thu 19-10-17 Fri 22-09-17 Fri 20-10-17 0 days 0 days P09 Print Manual Fri 22-09-17 Thu 05-10-17 Fri 06-10-17 Fri 20-10-17 10 days 10 days p10 Beta site Fri 20-10-17 Thu 02-11-17 Fri 20-10-17 Fri 03-11-17 0 days 0 days p11 Manufacture Fri 03-11-17 Mon 20-11-17 Fri 03-11-17 Tue 21-11-17 0 days 0 days p12 Release and ship Tue 21-11-17 Thu 23-11-17 Tue 21-11-17 Thu 23-11-17 0 days 0 days As it can be seen the activities p03, p06 and p09 have slack while other activities have no slack. If the critical and non-critical activities are separated the results are as follows. The critical activities have zero slack. Every project unique specifics, but there are some key roles that apply to most projects. The Project Manager has the day to day responsibilities at the executive level. The Project sponsor owns and controls the resources needed for the project’s success while the client represents the interests and needs of the end user group (Hobbs, 2015). The project is expected to be completed on time. Hence there will be no bonus or penalties. Obviously, the result will depend on the availability of resources, incorporation of unexpected delays and slippage in critical activities but assuming that all things go as planned the project should be completed on time. The delay of 3 days in the completion of activity P06 (Edit and publish notes) should not affect the project as there is a slack time of 57 days for this activity and the overall time for the project would not be affected by the expected delay. Had the delay been in an activity which had no slack or was critical than the overall project could have been affected. As Cârstea (2014) mentions, good project managers should be able to recognize symptoms, diagnosis of the problems and be able to suggest remedial solutions. Project manager manages resources, investing in the correct resource to ensure timely activity completion. The project specifications do not tell the number of resources attached to each phase of the project. This information is essential to ensure that resource management and cost of the project can be managed. It will be difficult to assign and remove resources from the project without visibility of the number of resources and the cost of the respective resource. Currently, the project has no visibility of any holidays other than the standard weekend. Need for good stakeholder management is essential for project management and strong relationships within the project with stakeholders ensure that the stakeholders’ needs and concerns are noted and taken care of while executing the project plan (Orr, 2004). Requirements analysis should be done with commitment with all stakeholders, so critical elements of the system are documented, so the system design handles these requirements. It might be required to choose a system that can be customized to meet stakeholders’ requirements. Network diagram wise the flow looks like Proactive and Reactive Controls Orr (2004) further stresses stakeholder management for effective project management asserting maintenance of strong relationships with the relevant principals. These relationships have to be nurtured and managed throughout the project. Stakeholder management plan can be used to work out and write down their relevant specific wants. Obtaining and keeping control of the project means the definition of the roles and responsibilities of the people working on the project through reactive and proactive controls. Reactive control is gaining control of responsibilities that others assume without your agreement. This can be achieved by setting up a mechanism that maintains the ambits of control of all players within the project thus ensuring that relevant persons take appropriate onus and deliver there end of the bargain. Proactive control, on the other hand, is gaining control by deliberately appointing people into specific roles and responsibilities and requires the project manager to seek out appropriate people and appoint them into certain key roles. These roles will have a significant impact on the early project work. These are the roles that will be highly active in the initial day-to-day work of the project. Contingency planning should be done so that alternative measures can be taken to offer coordinated, efficacious and timely response to a risk is done, so work continues despite setback (Egeland, 2009). Accelerating Schedule Kendrick (2011) states that delays can be compensated with multiple methods. Similarly, need for acceleration of project schedule can be handled depending on the resource constraints. If extra resources are available, then those may be apportioned, or if resources aren’t available then the project manager may need to juggle with existing resources through streamlining nonessential tasks. The project manager also would need to make the existing resources work extra time to get the project completed according to accelerated schedule getting help from within your team to expedite activities and catch up. As Biafore (2011) explains fast-tracking a project may be helped if activities can be run in Parallel or concurrently—as long as they use different resources and the risks are acceptable. Also by creating partial overlaps, where next task is started before predecessor is complete, fast track objectives could be met. Whatever method is chosen for shortening the schedule the tasks on the critical path should be the first place to consider as the critical path represents the longest sequence of tasks in a typical project and reducing the critical path duration would reduce the overall project duration. The demands for squeezing and accelerating schedules may come from project problems or through entertaining requests from the customer. The requested changes should be handled at the outset and if the delivery is impossible – communicate to the customer. Scheduling change decision should be made promptly. The primary considerations are cost and benefits. Cost can vary depending on requirements of extra resources, time availability, etc. The possible tactics are getting extra funding, expediting or crashing (adding more resources to a project to shorten its duration). Also, reassignment of resources, management of reserve may be required. Small suggested changes may be handled with rearrangement of the remaining work and overtime. Larger changes require multiple tactics that will shorten project time with minimal cost increase and minimal increased risk. In practice, it does not always work out this way as adding resources begins to increase duration instead of shortening it. The new resources aren’t familiar with the tasks at hand and would turn out to be less productive than the current team members. And if the experienced team members are not present then who would guide the new members to move up the learning curve? Crashing is more useful on the most cost-effective tasks as it allows to shorten schedule with lowest possible cost. If the project stakeholders want a shorter schedule, a lower budget, or both, cutting scope may be answered (Biafore, 2011) Risk Management “A ‘risk’ is anything that can lead to results that deviate negatively from the stakeholders’ 'real requirements for a project” (Glib, 2002). Risk management activity identifies risks and takes proactive actions to remove, reduce or control risk producing activities. Identifying risk is an important aspect of managing projects. The risks may come from multiple sources, some under control and some beyond control. Knowing the risks and charting their possible impact would enable to build contingency measures. It is not possible to have resources to deal with all identified risks to the project. Potential problems should be categorized according to their probability and impact – based on these rankings the seriousness of threats can be benchmarked. Again committing resources to a risk would consume resources so it is best to determine a threshold beyond which threat should be actively engaged and below which threshold the threat will be left for monitoring without engagement. Threats may be handled in some ways. Threats can be avoided – taking an alternative course of action which avoids the threat. This might mean taking an alternative course of action. Assumption means that while one is aware of the risk, wait and see approach monitors the risk unless the risk crosses the threshold line. Prevention implies taking steps to reduce the fallout of probability of occurrence. This would mean finding a root cause of the problem and identifying preventive measures that would reduce the problem’s severity (Egeland, 2009). Project Planning Each project has an element that is unlike its predecessors. Milosevic (2005) offers a better way, with an integrated set of carefully defined and explained tools that may be tailored to the needs at hand thus offering comprehensive, powerful capability to manage projects. Customer Roadmap is a tool that helps in setting up a systematic approach to listening to the customers. The benefits of the roadmap are that it visually depicts the process to obtain customer input makes the process clear and simple, and secondly, it’s helpful in educating team members top obtain quality input from project customers. Network diagram for analyzing, planning and scheduling them to meet a target date at minimum cost projects determining the critical activities and their impact on project completion. Gantt chart can be used for visual depiction of project activities. Gantt Chart shows when the project and respective activities start and end against the horizontal time scale. WBS is the grouping of project elements identifying entire scope of project work. WBS can also be described as project family tree displaying project deliverables which are further broken down into more detailed deliverables. WBS gives projects a strong visual outlook and tends to present project activities in an orderly fashion in a clear, structured family tree or “Table of Contents” format. This format is simple to understand and make. Conclusion The printer drivers’ project has limited activities and few multiple dependencies. This project does not specify the number of resources and cost of the resource. Currently without reducing the duration of activities on the critical path, fast-tracking the project may be difficult. On the other hand, the project duration may increase if any activity on the critical path takes longer or any task not on critical path exceeds the slack. Thus for proactive project management, the unknowns of the project need to be reduced, and clear communication channel needs to be established with all stakeholders so expectancy can be realistically managed within the constraints of the project scope, budget, and resources availability. References Biafore, B. (2011). Successful project management. Sebastopol: O'Reilly. Biafore, B. (2013). Microsoft Project 2013. Sebastopol, Calif: Pogue Press. CÂRSTEA, C 2014, 'IT Project Management - Cost, Time and Quality', Economy Transdisciplinarity Cognition, 17, 1, p. 28, Complementary Index Chatfield, C. and Johnson, T. (2015). Microsoft Project 2013. Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press. Egeland, B. (2009) “Risk Management: Analyzing Threats to Your Project” [online] available from http://pmtips.net/?p=2814 Gilb, T. (2002). 9.1.5 Risk Management: A practical toolkit for identifying, analyzing and coping with project risks. INCOSE International Symposium, 12(1), pp.365-372 Hobbs, P. (2015). Project management. 2nd ed. New York: DK Publishing. Kendrick, T. (2011). 101 project management problems and how to solve them. New York: AMACOM, American Management Association. Orr, A.D. (2004) Advanced Project Management: A Complete Guide to the Key Processes, Models and Techniques. Kogan Page: USA .