Name: Zeeshan Mushtaq

Roll Number: 213542608

SOFTWARE PROJECT MANAGEMENT

SUMMARY (PROJECT MONITORING AND CONTROL)

1. A project plan mainly consists of a project schedule and a project budget. To

track the progress of a project, we usually define various milestones in the
project schedule. Some good project monitoring methods are status reports,
Goldratt's critical chain method, Gantt charts, earned value management (EVM),
etc.

2. If for some reason, a milestone is not met as per plan then the project manager
has to explain to the upper management/customer as to why the milestone was
not met as per plan and what are the next steps to ensure that milestones after
this one are not affected. Techniques like resource leveling, resource
optimization, schedule optimization, etc. can be applied to put the project on
track.

3. There can be deviations in schedule and costs. For example, the project cost
mentioned in the plan was $60 but later during the execution, the actual cost
turned out to be $65. So we have a deviation of +5%. Each deviation should be
tracked throughout the entire project execution. A plan should be made to fix
these deviations.

4. If baseline information is available we can measure performance indicators such

as cost, schedule, and quality work. We cannot compare the data if the planned
indicators are not available against the actual ones.

5. Project plans are tracked at the milestone level while project schedules are
tracked at the task level.

6. When we measure project progress without EVM, it is difficult to track whether

the project is progressing well or not as the actual schedule.
7. Resource utilization is a measure of the efficiency with which available resources
within an organization are utilized in projects.

8. Resource utilization in projects can be measured using the information as to how

many hours of project work is allocated to the resource and how many hours of
actual work the resource has put in.

9. A training plan is made if there is a gap between resource mapping and project
tasks.

10. For every risk, a contingency plan should be developed so that the risks could be
contained and it wouldn’t affect the project severely.

11. The project manager should prepare status reports and present it to the
customers so that the customer/upper management would be aware of the
current progress of the project.

12. Slack time allows an activity to start later than originally planned whereas float
time allows an activity to take longer than originally planned.

13. Most of the activities are performed at the iteration level and thus, most of the
planning is also done at this level.