Project+ Study Notes 16 Flashcards
also known as top-down estimating is a technique that uses actual durations from similar tasks on a previous project. This is most frequently used at the early stages of project planning, when you have limited information about the project. Although ??? can provide a good approximation of task duration, it is typically the least accurate means of obtaining an estimate. No two projects are the same, and there is the risk that the project used to obtain the ??? is not as similar to the current project as it appears.
Analogous estimating
Ask for people who have completed a similar task on a previous project to assist with the estimates for this project. This is a technique to find duration estimates.
Expert Judgement
is a quantitatively based estimating method that multiplies the quantity of work by the rate. To apply quantitatively based durations, you must know the productivity rate of the resource performing the task or have a company or industry standard that can be applied to the task in question. The duration is obtained by multiplying the unit of work produced by the productivity rate. For example, if a typical cable crew can bury 5 miles of cable in a day, it should take 10 days to bury 50 miles of cable.
Parametric estimating
and three-point estimates are similar techniques. The difference is that three-point estimates use an average estimate to determine project duration, while ??? uses what’s called expected value (or the weighted average). Expected value is calculated using the three-point estimates for activity duration and then finding the weighted average of those estimates.
PERT
Creating the schedule involves all the work you’ve done so far, including defining the tasks, sequencing the tasks, and determining duration estimates. You will now plug this information into the schedule and establish a start date and a finish date for each of the project activities.
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A milestone is typically denoted on a project schedule as an event that is achieved once all the deliverables associated with that milestone are completed and it has a duration of zero.
A milestone chart tracks the scheduled dates and actual completion dates for the major milestones.
As the project manager, you should pay close attention to milestone dates because they are also a communication trigger. Stakeholders need to be informed when major deliverables are completed or when a project has successfully moved to a new phase. If these dates are not met, you need to communicate the current status, the plans to bring the project back on track, and the new milestone date.
Milestone Info
is a tool that can save you a lot of time in creating your schedule. You can enter tasks, durations, and/or start and end dates; assign resources; and generate a graphical representation of the project. The most common way to display project schedules is a Gantt chart.
Project management software
can show milestones, deliverables, and all the activities of the project including their durations, start and end dates, and the resources assigned to the task. ??? typically display the tasks using a horizontal bar chart format across a timeline.
Gantt Chart
determines the amount of float time for each activity on the schedule by calculating the earliest start date, earliest finish date, latest start date, and latest finish date for each task. Float is the amount of time you can delay the earliest start of an activity without delaying the ending of the project. Tasks with the same early and late start dates and the same early and late finish dates have zero float and are considered critical path tasks. If a critical path task does not finish as scheduled, the project end date will be affected.
CPM
the critical path is the longest full path on the project. The simplest calculation you can use for the exam is to add up the duration of each activity for each path on the project and determine which one is the longest.
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