Project Management Flashcards
Costs and Benefits can be …
- tangible or intangible
- immediate or long-term
In scheduling, what is smoothing?
When resources over the period of a project are highly irregular:
- process of equalling out the resources
- smoothing out the peaks
- using float days
- does not extend the overall timeline
- done voluntarily
In scheduling, what is levelling?
When resource constraints force you to reschedule items
- e.g. only 10 people available to work per day
- can increase the project timeline
What is the Systems Design Lifecycle + 8 phases
a phased cycle
- Initiation
- Feasibility study
- Requirements analysis
- Systems design
- Build
- Implement
- Maintain
- Kill
typical accumulative resource demand (on a graph)
an ‘S curve’
What is resource management?
- ensures that resources available when required
- ensures they are used efficiently
resource planning:
- Specify a cost rate for each category or resource
- Cost rate is commonly expressed in terms of currency units, per unit of resource, per unit of time
3 categories of resources
- exhaustible – finite: e.g. minerals, time
- replenishable – renewable: e.g. materials, money
- reuseable – e.g. people, plant, accommodation
How to establish a budget?
- Define the work
- Schedule the work
- Allocate resources & budget
Draw the Stakeholder Analysis Matrix
and why move people to the right side?
Yellow Box People
- People in the yellow box don’t fully understand how they are affect by the project and what is being done — knowledge gap.
- But they are influencial, so it is important to move them from the left to the right side, make them more interested in the project!
- set up one-to-one meetings for people on the left
Green Box People
- Turn into positive communicators of this project.
Float Days
The amount of time (days) an activity can be delayed without affecting the project completion date.
The difference between the latest and earliest starting date:
LST - EST
Crash Actions
Fixing problems by adding more resources, e.g. hiring more people, or working longer…
but this might not be straightforward
- people work not as hard in a team
- emegerent properties cause faster work
- admisterating the crash action can take time
- training extra labor is costly, better do overtime!
- ………
Define Schedule diagrams
a visual representation of when things happen
good for managing expectations (for project and tasks scope)
gives people a high-leve idea of the prject
What are schedule dependencies?
shows which activities need to be in sequence and which can be done in parallel
activities that depend on another activity in order to begin
What is the Gantt Chart + advantages
a planning and communcation tool in form of a bar chart
planning: shows people their task and given time, and shows them the work that needs to be done beforehand
communication: may not give exact details but shows stakeholders what the project entails and what the overall high-level duration will be
Gantt Chart (visually) helps indentify milestones
acts as baseline for the future changes and deadlines
What is the critical path in scheduling?
The path in a network diagram that has no floats.
if there is a delay in any of the activities within the critical path, the overall project will be delayed
The critical path is the longest sequence of activities in a project plan which must be completed on time for the project to complete on due date. An activity on the critical path cannot be started until its predecessor activity is complete;
Benefits of scheduling
- Confirms viability
- Defines task sequence
- Enables resource profiling (smoothing/levelling resources)
- Provides monitor points
- Exposes schedule risks
- Determines overall duration
- Shows critical path
- Gives people an idea when their work is and what comes before
- Communicates the project scope very well (time-wise)
- Identifies dependencies and parallels
How can the project duration be calculated?
earliest start + earliest finish
- *earliest finish = earliest start + duration*
- *in detail:
- draw the schedule network
- identify dependecies
- calculate earliest starting time and latest starting time for each activity
- measure entire project duration as above formula
something that is ongoing within a project is a …
overhead task
can be represented in a as a continues line in a bar chart
resource histograms
visualises the resources demand for a given time
useful for visual communication of levelling and smoothing
can be combined with a bar chart
Define Stakeholder Management
identifying, analysing, and planing the communication, negation, and influence of stakeholders
typical stakeholder roles in a simple IT project
- Project Manager
- Project team members / SMEs (day-to-day people)
- Developers (internal or external)
- Upper management (part of a Steering Group)
- Project customer (internal or external)
- validating benefits of products, give requirements
- Resource Managers / Line Managers (in-between upper mgmt and team members)
- upper mgmt tells them to organise a representative of a team member to inform them about updates and be ready to answer questions — in-charge of allocations
- they are team managers, supervisors
- System user group
- users might be a different group of people from the customers
- Project testers
- could be specific role or part of system user group
Define a project
- a unique process, consisting of a set of coordinated and controlled activities…
- with start and finish dates, ….
- undertaken to achieve an objective…
- conforming to specific requirements, including constraints of time, cost and resources
General PM Info
- 95% of IT projects fail to some extent (use of professional IT management in the first place?)
- PM is increasingly in demand — a talent gap
- Association for Project Management (and similar organisations) certifies project managers
- Everything older than 6-7 years can be considered legacy IT systems
- The sponsor is usually saw the project’s purpose to begin with
projects vs. business-as-usual
The APM defines Project Management as:
an efficient way of introducing change — achieved by:
- Defining goal, generally in terms of time, cost, and various technical and quality parameters;
- Developing and executing a plan to achieve these, ensuring progress aligns with objectives;
- Using appropriate project management techniques to plan, monitor and maintain progress;
- Employing persons skilled in project management who are given [single] responsibility for introducing the change and are accountable for its successful accomplishment.
pet projects
projects just to be new and prove visible change
Outline the Project Lifecycle
- Concept / Initiation
- Design / Development
- Implementation
- Handover
The Concept / Initiation Phase
- Identifying the need for a project
- Sufficient justification for this project?
- High-level:
- Benefits/Cost analysis
- Risks and uncertainties
- Timeline
- Plan who will be involved
- Concept Phase produces the Business Case / Project Charter / Project Initiation Document (PID) (depends on methodology used)
Design Phase
- the definition phase; adding detail
- the sponsor gets the SMEs from their company that the project manager wants in his team
- Design Specification Document
Types of Reviews
where they occur and who chairs them
Gate review
- occurs at after a phase is complete
- opens the gate for the next phase
- chaired by the sponsor, steering group and PM at minimum (“sign off”)
Peer review
- evaluation by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work
- done to maintain or enhance quality or performance of the project
- usually done by stakeholders, since they have a high interest
Audits
- a formal, structured review
- assesses the progress (inter alia)
- checks if objectives are still aligned
Post-project review
- team feedback on future improvements
- lessons learned
Benefits realisation review
- chaired by sponsor!
- have the benefits been realised
- Any issues?
- etc…
(Continuous) Stakeholder Management
- stakeholders must be continuously (early and often),
- identified
- analysed
- informed/consulted
- negotiated
-
understand their
- level of interest
- power/influence over the project
- expectations!
- necessary level of involvement
- how they will be engaged
- appreciate their perspectives
- manage potential conflicts of interests
what is a work package
unit of work at lowest WBS level
- allocated to a WP manager or team member
- consists of:
- Specification
- Quality criteria
- Constraints
- Dependencies
- Interfaces
- Reporting
- what specifications are associated with that particular work
Layout the estimating process
Explain the 4 estimating approaches
Comparative (Top Down)
- based on opinions of experienced person using recollections of a similar project
- done early in project
- usually requires scaling and adjusting
- also to organisational culture, computer literacy, mgnmt support
-
Limitations
- relies on accurate historical data
- projects may not be as similar as they appear
- need to adjust to scale
- less reliable (uncertainty and lack of detail)
Parametric
- quantitative (that is scalable, linear tasks — 1 meter of rail costs 2€)
- multi-variable formula
- cost, effort or material data
- software tools
- known as Boehm’s Constructive Cost Model (‘COCOMO’)
Bottom Up
- uses the WBS
- planning phase onwards
- can be complex relationships between factors
- identify full costs of each task
- ask the people who will do the work
- aggregate to give the total cost
-
Limitations
- time-consuming
- ‘contingency’ may be added in by task owners
- errors may compound
Three-Point Estimating
- Estimate that reflects current uncertainty.
- Asking SMEs for 3 data points:
- optimistic (O)
- pessimistic (P)
- the most likely (ML) estimate
- Gives the impression of scientificness, which it is NOT because they are still based on guesses. Human error and bias.
The Estimating Funnel
Estimates improve as the project progresses
The process of scheduling
Typical product phases compared to cash flow:
