Project Management

Misbah Faiz
BE Mechanical Program
Spring 2024 Semester
How to present a Project Schedule?
• A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart that maps out a project
schedule. It is a highly visual representation of a projects tasks with
clear breakdowns of who's responsible for the work and when those
tasks are due

• Fun fact: the chart gets its name from American engineer, Henry
Gantt, who helped popularize the chart in the early 1900s.
Best practice for Project Plan
• Ensuring careful review of project deliverables, milestones, and tasks;
• Giving yourself time to plan;
• Recognizing and planning for the inevitable (things will go wrong);
• Staying curious;
• and championing your plan
• Calculate float/slack: In project management, “float” or “slack” is the
amount of time a task can be delayed without affecting the deadlines
of subsequent tasks or the project's final delivery date.
Kanban Boards
• Kanban boards are a visual tool used to manage tasks and
workflows. Kanban boards can be created on whiteboards, magnetic
boards, poster boards, computer programs, and more.
• Typically most suitable for project teams working in an Agile project
management approach
• Kanban boards are used to:
• Give a quick visual understanding of work details and provide critical task
information.
• Facilitate handoffs between stakeholders, such as between development and
testing resources or between team members who work on related tasks.
• Help with capturing metrics and improving workflows.
 Creating cards – It will vary
• Front
• Title and unique identifier: Make sure you have a quick reference for tasks and ID
numbers.
• Description of work: Briefly describe the task to be accomplished. Remember that this is
intended to be captured on something no larger than an index card.
• Estimation of effort: Estimate the amount of work it will take to complete the task. For
example, you can write “small,” “medium,” or “large” to indicate the level of effort you think
that task will involve.
• Who is assigned to the task: Indicate who is responsible for completing the task; ideally,
one person per card.
• Back
• Start date: Include the start date of the task for use in metrics, tracking, and ensuring that
your time estimate is accurate.
• Blocked days: Indicate which days your task may be halted. A task can become blocked if it
can’t continue to be worked on. For example, if you were supposed to receive a deliverable
and it hasn’t been delivered yet, then your day may be blocked for this particular task.
• Finish date: As with any plan, it is important to track when the task is supposed to be
finished. This allows you to ensure that your project is still on track to reach the end goal.
Activity
• Create a Kanban Board for your FYP
Resource Leveling
• A technique that involves adjusting project dates to ensure it can be completed
with available resources.
• A technique that involves resolving overallocation or scheduling conflicts to
ensure a project can be completed with the available resources. Resources
include the time, materials, or tools needed to complete a project.
• Not only are there managerial implications to resource leveling, there are also
important cost implications.
• Depending on your team needs, here are possible outcomes:
• If the goal is to keep the current project deadline, more resources may need
to be made available.
• If the goal is to run the project with currently available resources, the deadline
of the project may be extended.
When to use resource leveling
• To optimize your resources: get the most out of the resources you
have on hand
• Minimize deficits: prevents significant project delays, thereby
minimizing the losses in costs and labor
• Prevent task overloading: prevents this by resolving overallocation
issues and adjusting deadlines to ensure team members don’t have
too much on their plates
• Ensure quality of a project output: manage both resources and client
expectations by maintaining the same level of quality for project
deliverables
Resource leveling examples
• Example one: Delaying a project start date
• A project requires a designer to create mock-ups for the client, but the
designer was double-booked, and the rest of the design team is occupied as
well. They decide to start the project two days later when the designer is
available. Since the designer works fast, the project end date remains the
same.
• Example two: Obtaining additional resources
• The IT team has been responding to a large number of IT requests to deal
with a virus that infected company computers. Since the company’s current
antivirus software isn’t robust enough to handle the virus, the team decides
to invest in new antivirus software so they’re able to fix the computers.
Can you level?
Schedule Compression / Reducing project
duration
• Imagine the following scenarios:
• —After finalizing your project schedule, you realize the estimated
completion date is two months beyond what your boss publicly
promised an important customer.
• —Five months into the project, you realize that you are already three
weeks behind the drop-dead date for the project.
• —Four months into a project top management changes its priorities
and now tells you that money is not an issue. Complete the project
ASAP!
Options when resources are not constrained
• Adding resources: The most common method for shortening project
time is to assign additional staff and equipment to activities
• Outsource project work: A common method for shortening the
project time is to subcontract an activity.
• Schedule overtime: The easiest way to add more labor to a project is
not to add more people, but to schedule overtime. If a team works 50
hours a week instead of 40, it might accomplish 20 percent more.
• Do it twice – Fast and correctly: If you are in a hurry, try building a
“quick and dirty” short-term solution, then go back and do it the
right way.
Options when resources are constraint
• Improving efficiency: The project team may be able to improve productivity by
implementing more efficient ways to do their work.
• Fast tracking: Sometimes it is possible to rearrange the logic of the project
network so that critical activities are done in parallel (concurrently) rather than
sequentially. This alternative is commonly referred to as fast tracking and is a
good one if the project situation is right. When this alternative is given serious
attention, it is amazing to observe how creative project team members can be in
finding ways to restructure sequential activities in parallel.
• Reducing Project Scope
• Compromise quality: Reducing quality is always an option, but it is rarely
acceptable or used
Rationale for Reducing Project Duration
• Time to market
• Rapid innovation
• Unforeseen delays
• Imposed deadlines
• High overhead costs
Understanding project budgets
• A project budget is the estimated monetary resources needed to
achieve the project's goals and objectives.
• You break the budget down by milestones, which are important
points within the project schedule that indicate progress and usually
signifies the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project, and
list activities and tasks alongside their associated costs (forecasting).
• The budgeting process usually happens in conjunction with the
scheduling process because the steps of the scheduling process are
highly dependent on the costs.
Budgeting Best Practice
• Reference historical data
• Utilize your team, mentors, or manager
• Time-phase your budget
• Check, check, and double check
Direct Costs Vs Indirect Costs
• Direct costs
These are costs for items that are
necessary in order to complete your
project. These costs can include:
• Wages and salaries of employees and
contractors
• Materials costs
• Equipment rental costs
• Software licenses
• Project-related travel and
transportation costs
• Staff training
• Indirect costs
These are costs for items which do not
directly lead to the completion of your
project but are still essential for the
project team to do their work. They are
also referred to as overhead costs.
These costs can include:
• Administrative costs
• Utilities
• Insurance
• General office equipment
• Security
Baseline Budget
• A baseline budget is an estimate of project costs that you start
with at the beginning of your project. Once you have created a budget
for your project and gotten it approved, you should publish this
baseline and use it to compare against actual performance progress.
This will give you insight into how your project budget is doing and
allow you to make informed adjustments.
Contingency Budget or Reserve Analysis
• Contingency budget in the context of project management, is money
that is included to cover potentially unforeseen events that aren't
accounted for in a cost estimate.
• The purpose is to compensate for the uncertainty that occurs in cost
and time estimates, as well as unpredictable risk exposure.
Budget Template
Budget Challenges
• Challenge 1: Budget pre-allocation
• You may encounter situations where your budget is already set before you
even start the project. This is known as budget pre-allocation. Some
organizations follow strict budgeting cycles, which can lead to cost
estimations taking place before the scope of the project is completely
defined.
• Challenge 2: Inaccurately calculating TCO
• Another budgeting pitfall you should try to avoid is underestimating the total
cost of ownership (TCO) (direct & indirect costs)for project resources.
TCO takes into account multiple elements that contribute to the cost of an
item. It factors in the expenses associated with a product or service over its
lifetime, rather than just upfront costs.
• Challenge 3: Scope creep
• Scope creep is when changes, growth, and other factors affect
the project’s scope at any point after the project begins. Scope
creep causes additional work that wasn’t planned for, so scope
creep can also impact your budget.
Activity – Create a Budget!
• As project manager for Office Green, your job includes working with
the operations team to develop and implement an Operations and
Training plan for the Plant Pals service. In addition to identifying the
major milestones and associated tasks for this plan, you also need to
estimate the costs and create a budget.
• Milestone 1: Establish a plant delivery and logistics plan.
• Task 1: Purchase delivery trucks. Purchase two delivery trucks at a cost of $15,000 per truck.
• Task 2: Source packaging materials. Purchase 1,500 boxes at a cost of $2 per box.
• Task 3: Pay delivery drivers. Pay two delivery drivers for ten days (assume eight-hour work days) at
a rate of $15 per hour.
• Milestone 2: Select and install supply chain management software and equipment.
• Task 1: Source vendor (includes setup, installation, and deployment of software and equipment
systems): Fixed cost of $15,000.
• Milestone 3: Develop and launch an employee training program.
• Task 1: Develop training sessions. Pay the HR specialist $50 per hour for ten days (assume eight-
hour workdays).
• Task 2: Train employees to use the software and equipment. Pay the Training Manager $25 per
hour for ten days (assume eight-hour workdays).
• Task 3: Monitor employee progress and improve training processes. Pay the Training Manager $25
per hour for another ten days (assume eight-hour workdays).
• Your estimated budget to reach these milestones is $62,000. This amount includes a reserve
buffer of $3,600 to account for unexpected costs. You should generally allow for a buffer of at
least 5%.