Chapter 3

• Project management


  • One of the most useful tools for managers
  • Easy to learn, master, and get certified
  • An important employment differentiator
• Role of a project manager


  • Highly visible position
  • The focal point of the project
  • Leads the project's: planning
  • Ensures the project team receives motivation, direction, and information
  • Responsible for: schedule, budget, results
• Project managers


  • Good coaches, good communicators, able to organize activities from a variety of disciplines
• Definition of a project

  • Unique and non-routine activities
  • A problem with a known solution scheduled for completion
  • A specific, finite "task" to be accomplished
• Task


  Set of activities that comprise a project
• Work packages


  Division of tasks
• Work units


  Division of work packages
• Project's risk areas

  • Scope/deliverables
  • Technology
  • Financials
  • People/team
  • Organizational Strategy
  • External factors
• Work Breakdown Structure


  • Hierarchical decomposition of the project into: phases, deliverables, work packages
  • A tree structure, which shows a subdivision of effort required to achieve an objective
• Project Scheduling and Execution

  Ensure that all activities are planned for, order of performance of all activities are accounted for, all activities' time estimates are recorded, the overall project time is developed
• CPM & PERT Network Techniques Steps

  1. Define the project and prepare its work breakdown structure

  2. Determine relationships among the activities – ex: which activities must precede and which must follow others

  3. Draw the network connecting all of the activities

  4. Assign time and cost estimates to each activity

  5. Compute the longest time path of sequence of activities through the network (this is called the critical path)

  6. Use the network to plan, schedule, monitor, and control the project
• Perform the critical path analysis

  • The project's longest sequence of activities from beginning to its end
  • the shortest time in which the project can be completed
  • any delay in critical path activities delays the projects
  • critical path activities have no "slack" time
• In the critical path we assumed a fixed time estimate for each activity with no variability in times. But in practice, activity times vary based on many factors.
• PERT

  • Uses a probability distribution for activity times to allow for variability
  • The 3 time estimates are required: Most likely time (m), Optimistic time (a), Pessimistic time (b)
  • Assumes: Total project completion times follow a normal probability distribution, Activity times are statistically independent
• Project variance


  The sum of the variances of critical path activities
• Project crashing

  Shortening the duration of the project
• Project planning

  • establishing goals/objectives
  • defining project
  • creating work breakdown structure
  • determining needed resources
  • selecting and forming team
• Project controlling

  • monitoring: resources, costs, quality, budgets
  • feedback enables revising the project plan and shift resources