Week 3 Flashcards
What is project management?
Project management consists of planning, scheduling, monitoring and controlling, and reporting on information development
What is a project triangle?
Scope, Time, and Budget (Cost)
What does a project manager do?
Project planning, projecting scheduling, project monitoring, and project reporting.
What is project planning?
Project planning consists of identifying all project tasks (by taking into account project cost and time of each)
What is project scheduling?
Project scheduling consists of creating a timetable (showing tasks), task dependencies, and critical tasks that might delay the project.
What is project monitoring?
Guiding, supervising, and coordinating the project team’s workload.
What is project reporting?
Creating regular progress reports for management, users, and the project team.
What is the Gnatt Chart?
It is a horizontal chart (represents set of tasks / actual progress and end goal.)
What does PERT stand for?
PERT is called the Program Evaluation Review Technique. It was developed by the U.S Navy to manage complex projects.
What is CPM (Critical Path Method)?
The Critical Path Method was developed by private industry. It uses a bottom-up technique.
How do you identify tasks in a WBS?
A task is considered to be work that has a beginning and an end.
- A task/activity requires company resources (people, time, or money)
What are events / milestones?
All projects have events or milestones. They are recognizable reference points used to monitor progress.
What are the steps in creating a task in a WBS?
- ) Listing the task
2. ) Estimating task duration (hours, day,s or weeks)
When estimating a task or activity, how do you categorize them?
There are three different types of estimates:
Best case-estimate (B), Probable-case estimate (P), and worst-case estimate (W).
What affects the duration of a project?
- Experience with similar projects can affect the duration of a project. (Developing time and cost estimates based on similar/past developed information systems.)
What is a constraint(s)
It is defining system requirements that can be achieved realistically with the required constraints.
What are task patterns?
Arrangement of tasks in a logical sequence.
This can involve dependent tasks, multiple successor tasks, and multiple predecessor tasks.
What are dependent tasks?
Tasks that need to be completed in a sequence. One task can be initiated only after the prior task has been completed.
1 - > -2 > 3
What are multiple successor tasks?
These tasks can be initiated simultaneously. They are considered to be concurrent.
(Often there are parts of concurrent tasks that depend on a predecessor task.)
What are predecessor tasks?
When the initiation of a task depends on the completion of two or more prior tasks.
What is critical path?
Series of tasks which, if delayed, will affect the completion date of the overall project.
If any task on the critical path gets delayed, the WHOLE project will delayed.
How do you calculate the critical path?
- Review patterns
* Determine the start and finish dates (look at what define the critical path)
What is a structured walk-through?
Part of Monitoring and Control Techniques
Review of a project team member’s work by other team members. (occurs throughout the SDLC - software development life cycle).
- This is known as design, code, or testing reviews depending on what phase they occur in.
How do project managers monitor and control the work?
They anticipate problems, avoiding them, and minimize their impact.
They also identify potential solutions and select the best way to solve the problem.
What are project status meetings?
Project managers schedule regular meetings to share updates, discuss common problems, and explain new techniques.
It is also used to help collect data from teach members / conduct brainstorming sessions.
What are project status reports?
These reports are communicated by project managers to supervisors, upper management, or users.
Managers must communicate potential problems to the management at the same time.
What are the steps in PERT/CPM?
- ) Display the tasks and task patterns. (Identify task dependencies, enter task name, ID, and duration.)
- ) Enter the start and finish times. (In case of more than one predecessor tasks for a successor task, use the latest finish time of the predecessor tasks to determine the start time for the successor time.)
Then continuing left to right, add the tasks duration for each task to its start time to determine and enter its finish time.
What is risk management?
Review the project’s scope, stakeholder, budget, ,schedule, and any other internal or external factors that might affect the project,
Define project roles/responsibilities, risk management methods and procedures, categories of risks, and contingency plans.
What are the steps in risk management?
Qualitative risk analysis: evaluates each risk by estimating the probability that it will occur and the degree of impact.
Quantitative risk analysis: helps understand the actual impact in terms of dollars, time, and project scope, or quality.
What is a risk response plan?
This is putting in proactive effort to anticipate a risk and describe an action plan to deal with it.
This requires monitoring risks (conduct a continuous tracking process).
What does risk management software do?
- Assigns specific dates as constraints
- Aligns task dependencies
- Notes external factors that might effect a task
- Tracks progress
- Displays tasks that are behind schedule
What are budget issues?
- Unrealistic estimates
- Failures to develop an accurate forecast
- Poor monitoring of progress and slow response to early warning signs of problems.
- Schedule delays due to unforeseen factors
- Human resource issues
What are schedule issues?
- Failure to recognize task dependencies
- Confusion between effort and progress
- Poor monitoring and control methods
- Personality conflicts among team members
- Turnover of project personnel
- Failure of an IT project
