BUS528 Chapter 7 - 9 ideas (Summary)

This is the HW of week of week July 23-29 + plus word documents upload on ULearn.

 

Chapter 7: Realistic Scheduling
Once tasks (units in project) are identified during WBS process, individual tasks should have dependency or order. In scheduling process, program managers have to order the tasks, by identifying some can be parallelized, some should be sequential. Most importantly, tasks have to be identified their resource and duration. This normally needs the inputs from functional managers and their team members.  Experience level and numbers of resource (man power) usually determine the task duration, however, it is always important to consider appropriate numbers and level, allocation (assignment), work environment such as equipment availability.  It is highly recommended that project managers communicate with functional managers or lead-engineers. 

 

Example:

 

Project Name: Application porting project to different Platform - Total 6 weeks.
1.       Baseline development  (One engineer – 2 weeks)

•          New make target development 
• 　     Linked to new kernel library
•          Minimum frame work ported

2.       Testing of baseline application (One engineer – 3 days)
3.       Module base porting (5 engineers – 2 weeks)

• Module A porting and unit testing
• Same for B, C, D,  E

4.       Integration and testing (One engineer, 1 week)
5.       Testing result review and bug fix (? , ?)
Task 5 includes unknown factor and needs risk management. To schedule, use historical data and put conservative number, monitor closely.

 

Chapter 8: Accurate Estimating
(1 hour)
 How to increase the Accuracy in Estimation? The followings are keys to increase accuracy in project duration estimation:

• After WBS, have the experts to estimate tasks durations.
• Refer to the previous projects which is similar. (= Analogous Estimating)
• Allow for a reserve in the estimate to provide some level of padding in case of unknowns. (Conservative Estimation)
• Create some major milestones in the project to get the idea of overall progress,  make easy communication among departments. 

 In general, R&D projects are more difficult to estimate accurately because they are dealing with new problems. Providing estimation in ranges might help.  Besides duration estimation, project managers need to estimate the cost for resource and equipment.

 

Chapter9: Trade off among Cost, Schedule, and Quality
(2-3 hours)

 

Time-Cost-Quality Trade off analysis is one of the major problem in project management.  Various theories and optimization algorithms are studied and applied.  For instance, construction projects are the major candidates.1)   Many SW products are sold for estimation in the market. 2) However optimization process is very specific to the field of projects so that this chapter explains the basic principal which can be commonly applied to verious kinds of projects.

"Quality Triangle"
This shows the trade-offs inherent in any project.3)  

 

       T
      /   \
    C -- Q

 

The triangle illustrates the relationship between three primary forces in a project. Time is the available time to deliver the project, cost represents the amount of money or resources available and quality represents the fit-to-purpose that the project must achieve to be a success.The normal situation is that one of these factors is fixed and the other two will vary in inverse proportion to each other. For example time is often fixed and the quality of the end product will depend on the cost or resources available.

 

Example of SW product

 

Case1: Time->Fix { cost increase; pay for resource, with many qualified engineers, buy better equipment, then quality increase } or { cost decrease; with less engineers, quality decrease }

Case2: Quality->Fix  { cost increase; time decrease } or { cost decrease; time increase }

Case3: Cost->Fix  { Time increase; Quality increase} or { Time decrease; Quality decrease }

Case4: Cost and Time->Fix { Quality increase by reducing features } or { Quality decreasing by adding more features } 


Balancing (ideas from textbook):

• Project level

          Move people
          Outsourcing ( Has Negative/Positive effect)

• Business case level

          Reduce requirements for the products, or put in next release

• Enterprise level

          Outsourcing
          Oversea design centers
                        -> use the equipment during day and night (No down time), experts with cheap labor
          Prioritize the projects, focusing on one project
          Improve working environment to be productive, introduce tools or system.

 

 

Reference:
1) Refaat H. Abd El Razek, Ahmed M. Diab, Sherif M. Hafez, Remon F. Aziz “Time-Cost-Quality Trade-off Software by usingSimplified Genetic Algorithm for Typicalrepetitive Construction Projects” (2010) World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology 61
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_project_management_software
3) http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/project-management-scope-triangle.html