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

Chapter 5 & 6 ideas (Summary)

This is HW for the week of July 6-15 and 16-22.
The text book is "VERZUH, FAST FORWARD MBA in Project Management"
Page: 95 - 143

+ Word document upload to ULearn.

Chapter 5: Risk Management


Since projects are executed one time and it has definitive goal and due date, there would always be risks that they can not completed or delay due to uncertainty of the matters. It is important for project managers to predict the risks at the certain level so that they can minimize the effect to the project schedule and quality.

When and How project managers can predict uncertain things? Project management has 2 phases; 1) definition, 2) Planing, the risk management is done in 2nd phase, planing.

The framework of risk management is as follows:
1. Identification of risks
2. Analyze and Prioritization
3. Development of response plans
4. Establish Reserves Or repeat 1-3.

{ Useful TIPS }
Application of Probability Theory
Monitoring - Risk Log

~ TBD ~

Chapter 6: Work Breakdown Structure - WBS

In planning stage of the project management, creation of WBS is the important process. The design of structure can affect the estimation on both cost and schedule of the total work of the project.  In short, WBS is the collection of primitive tasks which are necessary to finish the projects, thus,  identification of task as a manageable unit is very important. The WBS design should be top-down meaning summary to details, or main to sub tasks.  In companies the process is normally call “scoping out” to tasks, the accuracy of the scope depends on persons who know the portion of the work in detail.   Normally, to identify each major milestone and task toward the goal, the communication among project managers and functional managers is important. In my opinion, it is more effective to be coupled with product lifecycle process information.

Framework example

Product
-          HW development
-          SW development
-          Integration (Beta release)
-          Verification  completion

HW development: 
-          HW1 HW design review
-          HW2 Schematic  review
-          HW3 Layout review   {  Fab/SW integration/Unit test/Performance testHW4 Unit test review  }

SW development:
-          SW1 SW design review
-          SW2 Unit test plan review
-          SW3 Unit test result review
-          SW4 Dev test result review 

Integration (Beta release)  

Verification completion

BUS528 Chapter 2 FOUNDATION PRINCIPALS

This chapter describes foundation principal of project management.

Project management is industry independent technique. Solid project management methods can be applied any industry and size of the projects. The goal is to improve the quality of the products with efficiency. This is the major factor for project management being studied as a discipline. However, project managers need skills and knowledge of the industries they belong. The project environment dictates skill requirements for project managers.

In this chapter, the details of project management functions are described. Most importantly, project definition must be done by the project manager. The purpose, goals, constrains should be clearly defined. Next thing is project manager needs to have controls, and to have the plan to meet the goal.  Finally communication is critical to have control and the plan progress smoothly.

Other points in this chapter:

• Project/product life cycle
• Organization

BUS528 PM Chapter 1 ideas and their application

{ This late submission for HW. }

VERZUH, The fast forward MBA in project management, 3rd edition, Wiley


One thing I leaned from this chapter was that demand of project management has been higher in large business organizations in US. So there are needs for standarized concepts and methods for this field. The organization PMI and IPMA provides the certification exam called PMP. It is good to lean the certified methods to increase the performance. I also learned was successful project managers need leadership. Communication skill is mandatory to get support from higher management, to get concensus among team members and functional managers. Also planing, setting scop and having the infrastructure in the organization are important to lead projects success.

In brief, the followings are the main ideas of chapter 1.

Chapter 1 summery

"Project management is the new critical leadership skill"

The Demand

As the organization is getting larger and progects are more complecated, demand for certified Program Manager is increased to make projects success. There are the organizations PMI and IPMA in US and PMP Exam is provided.

Definition

• What is project

- The set of works to do and it must have the beginning and end. For example, designing and building a new product is a project. Manufacturing the products is not a project but on going operation.

• What is project management 

- PM is a discipline - A set of methods and theory, communicates among executives, functional managers, and team members, coordination of force, estimate the efforts.

PM in the organization

• Need of PMO responsible for building infra in the organization.
• Best pmgrs are outstanding leaders.
• There are 5 important factors in PM: Agreement, plan, communication, controlled scope, management support