Project Management Flashcards
What is a project?
Has an beginning and an end
Interrelated set of activities
Unique outcome from a specific allocation of resources
What are the three main goals of a project?
Completed on time
Not exceed the budget
Meet specifications
What is a collection of projects called?
Program
What are the required steps before starting a project?
Define
- Scope
- Time frame
- Resources of the project
Select project manager and team
What are the characteristics of a good project manager?
- Facilitator
- Communicator
- Decision maker
What are the characteristics of a good team?
- Technical competence
- Sensitive
- Dedicated
What are the five steps to planning a project?
- Define the work breakdown structure
- Diagramming the network
- Developing a schedule
- Implementation
- Control and documentation
What is the work breakdown structure?
- Statement of all the tasks
- Task is the smallest unit of work effort that consumes both time and resource
- Each task must have and owner
How is a work breakdown structure network diagram drawn?
Uses boxes and arrows to depict relationships between tasks
What are the benefits of the structure network diagram?
- Identifies interrelationships between activies
- Enables estimation of comletion time
- Crucial activities are highlighted
- Cost/time tradeoffs can be analyzed
How are activity times estimated?
- Historical data
- Statistical analysis
- learning curves
- Informed estimates
What do schedules do?
Help managers achieve the objectives of the project by
- Estimating completion time through the critical path
- Identify start and finish time for each activity
- Calculate the slack time for each activity”
What is a path?
The sequence of activities between a project’s start and finish
What is the critical path?
The sequence of actvities betweeen a project’s start and finish that takes the longest
What is the earliest start time?
The latest EF of preceding activities.
What is the earliest finish time?
The ES plus the estimated duration.
What is the lastest start time?
The LF minus the estimated duration.
What is the latest finish time?
What is activity slack?
The maximum time an activity can be delayed without delaying the entire project.
(Activities on the critical path have zero slack)
How to calculate activity slack?
- S=LS-ES
- S=LF-EF
