PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Executive summary
The entire project task was organised by following a systematic approach, from the initiation
to the closure phase of the project life cycle. A part of this paper has been extended to reveal
all the project management techniques utilised to complete the project.

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 Table of Contents
2. Critical review of how the group organised the project management....................................4
3. Critical appraisal and discussion evaluating the team’s project, group contribution, and
various techniques applied to project management....................................................................5
3.2 Discussion of applied project management techniques....................................................5
References..................................................................................................................................7

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2. Critical review of how the group organised the project management
The project organisation that the entire team has undergone to manage this project was
systematic and process-based. The systematic processes followed to organise the project
management task have covered the entire project life cycle. As per the comment of
Gebrehiwet and Luo (2018), construction projects are highly complex and dynamic due to
various components that project managers achieve throughout the project life cycle. By
considering all these components, our team followed some steps systematically to achieve the
height of success in managing SOTD project. The first stage that the team has undergone was
the visualisation and initiation of the project. This stage carried out a significant role in
organising the entire project management tasks effectively. In order to support this claim, I
would like to reveal the tasks our team has done in this stage to form the final project
management plan.
The project initiation stage in the organising process drove us to arrange a meeting with all
team members for a constructive discussion over the project. As per the opinion of Leon and
Laing (2021), the project team encounters the greatest degree of uncertainty about the
project’s future at this stage. Our team has also encountered the same uncertainty while
determining the project scope critically. In order to ease the team’s uncertainty regarding
project scope development, one of our team members suggested to apply the 5W-1H
formula to evaluate project scope. Although this formula is widely incorporated to analyse
quality-related problems of a particular aspect, we have applied the concept here to evaluate
SOTD’s project’s scope. 5W-1H comprises what, when, where, who, which, and how (Knop
and Mielczarek, 2018). Alongside taking help from this theoretical concept, a critical
understanding of involved team members was necessary to accomplish the scope
development task. Thus, with the application of the team’s critical thinking-ability, we
effectively developed the entire project charter containing the project aim, objectives, budget,
scope, and stakeholders' roles & responsibilities.
Another crucial stage that the team went through to organise the project management task
was the planning stage where the task of developing the final project plan took place. Irfan et
al. (2021) have pointed out that poor project planning is one of the core reasons for the failure
of a project. In order to respond to this concern, our team members were equally involved in
the planning stage to give collaborative input to the development of the final project plan.
Before moving on to the next stage, we developed firstly developed the activity list and a
“Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)” to create a clear understanding of the achievable project
tasks. This was one of the fundamental aspects, which supports the way we organised the
project management tasks. The fundamental purpose was to allow each team member
including myself to observe associated activities as well as existing & impending risks in
light of the activity list and WBS. Identification of potential risks led the team to determine
the optimal solution for mitigating each risk.
One of the crucial aspects that we considered during the organisation of the project
management was the consideration of the Triple Constraints of the SOTD project. These
are time, cost, and scope. As per the claim of Abyad (2018), a key challenge to project
management is achieving all goals included in the project charter while adhering to triple
project constraints. Therefore, the task of scope determination was sorted out in light of the
5W-1H concept, whereas adherence to time & budget was made by developing a well-
defined schedule and budget plans. All these plans developed in this stage were executed
according to the sequences and approaches determined.
The quality controlling tasks were done in light of the PDCA cycle to make the process
systematic and organised. As per the comment of Tuhacek and Svoboda (20190, PDCA is a

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quality improvement framework that helps to improve the quality of a particular task. Plan-
do-check-act were the four stages followed to ensure quality while executing the final project
plan developed in group discussion. In order to organise the closure stage, we planned to
collect all documents related to task completion, so that what worked well and what did not
work as per the plan, could be understood. Responsibilities were distributed equally to all
four members to ensure group effort instead of individual effort. In order to organise the
closure stage, we decided to follow three main activities; a collection of necessary
documents, crosschecking the collected documents with set project parameters and reporting
it to the project authority. Therefore, the above discussion makes it obvious that the
organisation of the SOTP project was done by following a systematic approach in order to
improve accuracy in task accomplishment.

3. Critical appraisal and discussion evaluating the team’s project, group

contribution, and various techniques applied to project management
3.2 Discussion of applied project management techniques
Completion of the allocated project required our team to come up with relevant project
management techniques and apply them strategically. Below are the techniques utilised in
this project:
WBS
WBS has allowed the team to break the entire project activities into a set of manageable and
achievable project tasks. As per the comment of Burghate (2018), WBS is basically used as a
product-oriented grouping technique of all project-related work elements for the sake of
organising and defining the total project scope. In this project, we developed the WBS to
break down the entire tasks of the SOTP project into five inter-related work elements
(preparation of operational site, material and equipment acquisition, construction,
recruitment, and project management). In other words, the entire work package for the project
team was developed using this technique. As the project required the team to maintain an
organised approach while developing the project plan, we employed this technique to define
the work to be completed throughout the project life cycle.
Critical Path Method (CPM)
This is another technique that was used cognitively and strategically to estimate and monitor
the overall duration of the project. As per the opinion of Ba'Its et al. (2020), CPM also helps
to determine the project activities’ sequences with the longest duration. In order to determine
our project’s task sequences with longest as well as shortest duration, we developed task
sequences, dependencies, and their duration to find out the shortest path to be followed for
avoiding time shortage.
Risk management framework (RMF)
An RMF is one of the most valuable techniques utilised in every project to gain control of
project’s success factors. As per the comment of Willumsen et al. (2019), risk in a project is
an inevitable aspect that must be identified and dealt with proper response strategies. During
the project initiation and planning stage, our team applied this framework to identify existing
as well as impending risks. A risk management framework addresses project managers to
develop a risk register containing risk description, owner, risk evaluation (likelihood,
consequences, and severity), mitigation strategies, and risk status. We have adhered to each
of these aspects to develop a detailed risk register that can combat each project's risks.
Therefore, RMF is one such project management technique that we utilised in the SOTP
project for enhancing the success rate of the final delivered project product.
Gantt chart

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Alongside RMF, the Gantt chart can also be considered one of the most used techniques
applied in contemporary project management tasks. The fundamental reason for which we
have utilised this technique is to visualise all activities of the SOTP project over time. Such
an application was necessary to make it clear for the project team to understand what work
needs to be completed in a specific time. In this area, we mainly used MS projects to make
the task simpler and more understandable.
PERT Chart
The contribution of the PERT chart to the improvement of project planning and decision-
making cannot be overlooked. As pointed out by Akpan and Agadaga (2020), a PERT chart
assists a project manager in analysing project tasks and estimating the amount of needed time
for the accomplishment of each task. Therefore, the information included in the PERT Chart
helped to estimate the minimum time required for completing the SOTP project. In order to
develop such a PERT chart that would help the team to make proper estimations of project
tasks and allocated times, we used both qualitative and quantitative information obtained
from the project initiation stage.
Quality Management Technique (QMT)
The uses of the QMT technique can be implicitly noticed throughout the work. This is
because our team have applied a quality management framework namely the PDC cycle
while going for formulating each project planning, from task planning to risk management
planning. During the development of each project plan, this framework helped the
responsible team member understand the quality-related problem, developing a prototype
plan and presenting it to the team member, measuring the success, and proceeding
accordingly.
Therefore, the aforementioned techniques have been applied in the completion of the SOTP
project for the sake of delivering the final product in accordance with the pre-determined
outcome. Alongside using this framework, the theoretical concept of PMBOK was taken into
consideration to understand stages to be accomplished throughout the entire project life cycle.

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References
Abyad, A. (2018). Project management, motivation theories and process
management. Middle East Journal of Business, 13(4), 18-22. Available at:
http://mejb.com/upgrade_flash/October2018/Project%20Management.pdf [Accessed on: 1
June 2022]
Akpan, N. P., and Agadaga, G. O. (2020). Modelling Building Renovation Using
PERT. Asian Res. J. Math, 16, 25-38. Available at:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gregory-Agadaga-2/publication/
340458627_Modelling_Building_Renovation_Using_PERT/links/
5feb6ea6299bf1408859bfaf/Modelling-Building-Renovation-Using-PERT.pdf [Accessed on:
1 June 2022]
Ba'Its, H. A., Puspita, I. A., and Bay, A. F. (2020). Combination of program evaluation and
review technique (PERT) and critical path method (CPM) for project schedule
development. International Journal of Integrated Engineering, 12(3), 68-75. Available at:
https://publisher.uthm.edu.my/ojs/index.php/ijie/article/download/4207/3389 [Accessed on: 1
June 2022]
Burghate, M. (2018). Work breakdown structure: Simplifying project
management. International Journal of Commerce and Management, 3(2), 453-461. Available
at: https://www.ijcams.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/WBS-2.pdf [Accessed on: 1 June
2022]
Gebrehiwet, T., and Luo, H. (2018). Risk level evaluation on construction project lifecycle
using fuzzy comprehensive evaluation and TOPSIS. Symmetry, 11(1), 12. Available at:
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/11/1/12/htm [Accessed on: 1 June 2022]
Irfan, M., Khan, S. Z., Hassan, N., Hassan, M., Habib, M., Khan, S., and Khan, H. H. (2021).
Role of project planning and project manager competencies on public sector project
success. Sustainability, 13(3), 1421. Available at:
file:///D:/JAYED/June/3/1500/Resources/sustainability-13-01421.pdf [Accessed on: 1 June
2022]
Knop, K., and Mielczarek, K. (2018). Using 5W-1H and 4M Methods to Analyse and Solve
the Problem with the Visual Inspection Process-case study. In MATEC Web of
Conferences (Vol. 183, p. 03006). EDP Sciences. Available at: https://www.matec-
conferences.org/articles/matecconf/pdf/2018/42/matecconf_qpi2018_03006.pdf [Accessed
on: 1 June 2022]
Leon, M., and Laing, R. (2021). A concept design stages protocol to support collaborative
processes in architecture, engineering and construction projects. Journal of engineering,
design and technology. 20(3), pages 777-799. Available at: [Accessed on: 1 June 2022]
Tuhacek, M., and Svoboda, P. (2019, February). Quality of project documentation. In IOP
Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (Vol. 471, No. 5, p. 052012). IOP
Publishing. Available at:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/471/5/052012/pdf [Accessed on: 1 June
2022]
Willumsen, P., Oehmen, J., Stingl, V., and Geraldi, J. (2019). Value creation through project
risk management. International Journal of Project Management, 37(5), 731-749. Available
at: https://fardapaper.ir/mohavaha/uploads/2019/06/Fardapaper-Value-creation-through-
project-risk-management.pdf [Accessed on: 1 June 2022]

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Appendices
Appendix A: Gantt chart

(Source: Self-developed)

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Appendix B: WBS

(Source: Self-developed)