Chpt 9 Flashcards
What is a project?
Unique, one time operational activity or effort.
*Established objective
*Has defined life-span
*Time-frame, cost and performance requirements
What are the 5 phases of PM?
- Conception & Initiation
- Definition & Planning
- Launch or Execution
- Performance & Control
- Close
What are considerations for picking a project?
Strategic Alignment, Classifications, Cost/Benefit, Scoring & Ranking
What is matrix organization?
Team structure with members from functional areas, depending on the skills required (might split time between work and project)
What is scope creep?
Tendency for project to scope to expand over time
What is the Project Team?
Individuals from various departments within a company, dedicated to a project.
What is the scope statement?
Document that provides an understanding, justification, and expected result of a project.
What is the work breakdown structure (WBS)?
Decomposition of a project into components, activities, and tasks.
What is organizational breakdown structure? (OBS)
Chart showing which organizational units are responsible for work items.
What is responsibility assignment matrix?
Chart showing who is responsible for the work in a project.
What is risk management?
An attempt to recognize and manage potential and unforeseen trouble spots that may occur when the project is implemented
What are the steps in project scheduling?
- Define Activities
- Sequence activities (by precedence)
- Estimate time
- Develop schedules
What is a Gantt Chart?
Graph or bar chart with a bar for each project activity that shows the passage of time.
What is slack?
Amount of time an activity can be delayed without delaying the project.
What is a drawback of the Gantt Chart?
It doesn’t show precedence relationship very well
What is CPM??
Critical Path Method (Deterministic task times, activity-on-node)
What is PERT?
Project Evaluation and Revenue Technique (Probabilistic task time, activity-on-arrow)
What are nodes?
Events for points in time (completion or beginning of an activity in a project) - the network path that has the activity with zero slack
What is the “arrow”?
arrows show precedence relationships
What is the critical path?
The network path that has activities
with zero slack. The longest path through the activity network. Where you put your best people. Important for risk assessment.
What is earned value analysis?
Standard procedure for measuring a project’s progress, forecasting its completion date and cost, and measuring schedule and budget variation.
What managements are included in project control?
- Time
- cost (time-cost trade-off)
- quality
- performance
- communications
What is enterprise project management?
Management and control of a company-wide portfolio of projects (more than one at a time)
What is Beta distribution?
A probability distribution traditionally used in critical path method/project evaluation and revenue technique [CPM/PERT] to model activity time estimates.
What is project crashing?
Method of for shortening the project duration by reducing the time of one (or more) of the critical project activities to less than its normal activity time.
*Crashing is achieved by devoting more resources, usually measured in terms of dollars, to the activities to be crashed.
What is agile project management?
An approach that focuses on adaptability to rapid and unexpected change.
Used with projects with high levels of uncertainty. “Rolling wave” approach
Rolling wave development is concerned with iterations (waves) - describe the iterations
- last 1-4 wks
- goal for each is tangible progress
- at end of each, review progress and make adjustments
- each new iteration absorbs the work of the previous until project is completed and customer is satisfied
