assignment 3 (building a house budget using microsoft project

PM-FP4010 – Process Groups and Knowledge Areas in Project Management

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Assessment 3 Context

Scheduling A schedule is a timetable for a plan. It really cannot be established until the plan has been developed. In this assessment you have an opportunity to explore the following aspects of scheduling and project control:

• Estimating the duration of each activity.

• Establishing the estimated start-time and required completion-time for the overall project.

• Calculating the earliest times at which each activity can start and finish.

• Calculating the latest times by which each activity can start and finish in order to meet the end date.

• Determining the amount of negative or positive slack time between each activity.

• Identifying the critical path of activities, or the longest path.

The above scheduling activity leads into the activity of project control. In project control, you determine the effects of actual schedule performance on the planned schedule. You incorporate the changes into your schedule and update the project schedule. These are all tools to control the project schedule. Another tool which you will employ render your project schedule is Microsoft Project, which you will access via Toolwire.

We also investigate the second key factor in planning and executing a project, which is the use of resources. The term resources is usually used to describe people, but materials or equipment can also qualify. After you have assigned resources to all of your tasks, you, as the project manager, should ask the following questions:

• Will the assigned resources be enough to accomplish the task in the timeframe established?

• Do unforeseen resource dependencies exist?

• How much flexibility is there?

• Is the original project deadline realistic?

All projects have limited resources. Failure to schedule the use of resources usually shows up about halfway through a project, when it is very difficult to correct. A consequence of failing to schedule the use of resources is ignoring the peaks and valleys of resource usage over the time span of a project. Usually, resources will not line up with the timeframe of projects. The project manager must be able to deal with these situations.

Budgeting Cost planning is the third key factor in project planning because you must face the constraints of a budget.

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Your original proposal and project scope indicated you would do a project at a certain cost, and in the period required. Initially, you estimated the cost of the project. Now, you will begin to develop better cost-estimate utilization in your work breakdown segments. Once the project actually starts, you will need to monitor the activities to ensure that their costs are within the budget and the earned value of the work aligns with the expenditures.

If at any time during the project the budget is being exceeded, or the work value is not up to the planned expectations, you must take corrective action. Once a project begins to spin out of control, it is very difficult to complete the project within budget. As Gido and Clements indicate, "The key to effective cost control is to analyze cost performance on a timely and regular basis." (2015, p. 259).

Reference

Gido, J., & Clements, J. P. (2015). Successful project management (6th ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.