UMBB/IGEE Project Management

Project planning

1. Formatting project team with a leader

A project manager is the person assigned by the performing organization to achieve the
project objectives. As a project manager, you are the link between the strategy and the team.
you provide knowledge of project management and perform while applying that knowledge.
In other words, you don’t just know something, you know how to do something.
You accomplish your work through others and this requires you to draw upon your
interpersonal skills. Your personnel effectiveness, attitudes, core personality characteristics,
and leadership skills all play a role. You don’t just push your team to create a product or
service by a certain date, for a specific amount of money- you motivate and support them
along the way.
A project manager is a builder of teams, a motivator, a conflict resolution expert, a skilled
communicator, and so much more
Note: the project management team consists of those members of the project team who are
directly involved in project management activities. On smaller projects, the project
management team my include virtually all of the project team members
A project team is comprised of the project manager, project management team, and other
team members who carry out the work of the project, but who are not necessarily directly
involved with the management of the project. This team is comprised of individuals from
different groups with knowledge of a specific subject matter or with a specific skill set who
carry out the work of the project.
The project manager and the project management team must identify both internal and
external project stakeholders in order to determine the project related requirements and
expectations of all parties involved. It’s the responsibility of the project manager to manage
stakeholder expectations.
Note: project stakeholders are persons and organizations who are actively involved in the
project or those whose interest may be positively or negatively affected by the performance or
completion of the project. Various stakeholders may exert influence over the project
objectives and its not uncommon for them to have contrasting or conflicting interests. One of
the challenge that project manager faces is to effectively address, and where possible resolve
in favor of the clients/ end users surrounding the competing interests of the various
stakeholders.

2. Defining scope, and terms of reference.

Processes requirement to ensure that the project includes all the work required, and only the
work required, to complete the project successfully.

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Projects are composed of processes. A process is a series of actions bringing about result- an
output. The processes encompassed by a project are performed by people and generally fall
into one of two major categories:
Project management processes support the effective conduct of the project throughout its life,
these processes serve to define, organize, execute, and asses the work of the project. They
encompass multiple tools and techniques.
Product oriented processes ensure the specification and creation of the product(output) of the
project. These processes vary by application area and are typically defined by the project life
cycle.

3.Work Breakdown Structure.(WBS)

Organizational structure refers to how your project team is organized. A breakdown of the
total project into components to establish:
 How the work will be done?
 How people will be organized?
 How resources would be allocated?
 How progress would be monitored?
An organization may use one or all of the following
 Functional structure
 Matrix-based structure
 Projectized structure
 Composite structure
The best practice is to use the best structure which best supports successful project
completion.
4. Basic scheduling.
For basic scheduling: it consists of

 Project representation as network.

Why use project network?
 A convenient way to show activities and precedence in relation to the whole project.
 Basic of project planning(responsibility, role, and definition), and basic scheduling
and establishment of work time tables
 Describe the role and application of PERT/CPM for project scheduling.

 Define a project in terms of activities such that a network representation can be

developed.

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  Develop a complete project schedule.
 Estimation of activity durations.
 Forward and backward pass.
 Critical path determination
 Deterministic and probabilistic activity times.
 Determination of activity floats.
 Resource planning for projects
5. Time cost tradeoffs
Crashing an activity refers to the speeding up or shortening of the duration of an activity
by using additional resources. These include overtime, hiring temporary staff, renting
more efficient equipment, and other measures. Project crashing refers to the process of
shortening the duration of the project by crashing the duration of a number of activities
6. Normal and crash activity times.
The normal time refers to the estimated activity duration used with CPM or PERT in the
computation of earliest (latest) start or finish times. The normal cost refers to the activity
cost under the normal activity time.
The crash time refers to the shortest possible time to complete an activity with additional
resources. The crashing cost refers to the activity cost under the crashing activity time.
7. Linear/non linear time-cost relationship.
This relationship is assumed to be linear. Hence, for each activity a crash cost per period
(e.g.,per week) can be derived as follows:
(Crash cost - Normal Cost
Crash cost per period= (Normal time -Crash time)
The general procedure for project crashing involves the following four steps:
1. Compute the crash cost per period for all activities using Equation.
2. Find critical path(s) in the project network using the normal times and identify critical
activities.
3. Select a critical activity with the smallest crash cost per week that can still be crashed, in
the case that there exists only one critical path. Otherwise, select one activity from each
critical path that can be still crashed and yield the smallest total crash cost per period
(including a common activity among critical paths).Crash the selected activity or activities by
one period. Update the length of paths.
4. Stop the procedure if the completion deadline is reached. Otherwise, check to ensure
current critical path(s) are still critical and find the new ones, if any. Return to Step 3.

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8. Total project (direct and indirect) cost.
Project schedules influence both of direct costs of activities, and indirect costs associated
with the project.