(02) Defining the project Flashcards
What is a project?
- “A project is a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product or service.”
- “It is a complex, nonroutine, one-time effort limited by time, budget, resources, and performance specifications designed to meet customer demand.”
What are the steps of making a project?
Step 1: Defining the project scope.
Step 2: Establishing project priorities.
Step 3: Creating the work breakdown structure
Step 4: Integrating the WBS with the organisation.
Step 5: Coding the WBS.
What is Project Scope?
A definition of the end result or mission of the project – a product or service for the client/customer – in specific, tangible and measurable terms.
- Use creative ways to communicate scope e.g., models, prototypes, exclusions, etc.
What is the purpose of the scope statement?
- To clearly define the deliverable(s) for the end user.
- To be used by the project manager and participants as a planning tool and for measuring project success.
What is the statement of work (SOW)?
An expanded version of scope statement with risks, budget, etc.
What is Scope Creep?
The tendency for the project scope to expand over time due to changing requirements, specifications and priorities.
What are the effects of Scope Creep?
- Risk going over budget.
- Missing deadlines.
- Delivering low quality outcomes e.g. bugs in the code or faulty product.
- Ultimately leads to project failure.
How do you manage scope/project creep?
- Get agreement on scope before you launch. A good definition of the project scope helps to avoid project creep.
- Choose a technique to manage scope creep.
- Make a list of what is in scope (when stakeholders are certain about the scope).
- Set scope tolerance parameters (when stakeholders are not certain about the scope).
- Get stakeholders to sign off or review parameters.
What is the meaning of establishing project priorities?
There are shifts in the relative importance of criteria related to cost, time and performance parameters. Consider:
- Budget (cost).
- Schedule (deadline).
- Performance (scope).
What is Time-Constrain?
The product or service has to be finished/available by due date.
What is Scope-Accept?
The scope can be amended.
What is Cost-Enhance?
Costs should be optimised.
Time, scope, cost of these examples?
- Launch of the new Amazon Alexa.
- Delivery of a new University paper.
Time-constrain, scope-enhance and cost-accept.
Time, scope, cost of these examples?
- Building a house for a young family.
- Going on a world trip.
Time-accept, scope-constrain and cost-enhance.
Time, scope, cost of these examples?
- Concert.
- Sports event.
Time-constrain, scope-accept and cost-enhance.
What is a WBS?
A deliverable-oriented grouping hierarchal decomposition of the work to be executed by the project team to accomplish the project objectives.
What does a WBS do?
- Identifies the work elements / components (sub projects) involved in a project.
- Defines the relationship of the final deliverable to its sub-deliverables.
- Breaks all the work required for the project into discrete activities and groups those tasks into a logical hierarchy (not related to order of completion).
WBS descriptions should include a verb and a noun.
What is the Purpose of a WBS?
- It reflects the project objectives.
- It is the logical structure of deliverables for the project.
- It discovers the building blocks to be used for tracking cost and managing the schedule.
- It discovers the building blocks that will be used for control and communications.
- It discovers the building blocks to be used for the network plan.
What are the steps for creating the WBS?
- Team members write down all activities (tasks) they can think of.
- Activities are logically organised.
What are the guidelines when creating the WBS?
- The 100% Rule.
- Mutually exclusive tasks (or sub-tasks).
- Balance between breadth and depth.
What is the 100% Rule?
The WBS includes all the activities that must be done to complete the work defined by the project scope.
What are mutually exclusive tasks (or sub-tasks)?
No overlap among activities (or sub-activities) included in the WBS.
What is the balance between breadth and depth?
No more than seven (7) sister sub-activities under an activity in the WBS.
What are things to note when creating the WBS?
The project manager must decide how to organise the work and how many levels to include in the WBS.
