3. Indicate how using the precedence diagram method can help you manage team tasks and avoid conflict within your team.

Running head: MANAGEMENT 1

MANAGEMENT 5

Project Management

Student’s Name:

Institutional Affiliation(s):

Creating a Schedule

Creating a schedule for the project's tasks involves six necessary steps. The first involves noting down the tasks you are supposed to carry out to ensure that the minor crucial details are not excluded once the project schedule is out. Involving the team members in this stage is vital to ensure that every element of the project is comprehensively planned. The order of the tasks is then established with the aid of the team members. The next step involves creating milestones on the project schedule and ensuring that they are linked to the relevant tasks and appropriately placed. The timescale is then calculated to determine how long each task is expected to take. Finally, each individual is assigned a duty to ensure that everyone is counterproductive. The qualities that distinguish a team member can handle complicated assignment bestowed upon him are based on his ability to support inter and intra-departmental teamwork, their flexibility in conflict resolution, ease in coordination with other team members to ensure timely delivery, among others. A team member who does not have such attributes are entrusted with less demanding tasks.

Managing the Project Schedule

There are six steps involved in managing a project schedule. Create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to estimate the scope of the project by breaking it into easily manageable components such as milestones, tasks, and phases. Estimate the duration by ensuring that the activity is detailed enough to estimate the amount of effort that each sub-activity and activity will require to complete. According to Motoyama (2008), the stage involves assigning and allocating resources to activities and creating a resource table for the resources that will be used. Step four entails identifying the dependencies between tasks. Here, the immediate predecessors of all activities are identified and defined after placing all the activities and timeline necessary to complete the project. The next step is to determine the dependencies to determine the tasks that require others to be completed first to be able to be done. The last essential stage is to determine the milestones, that is, grouping related tasks after breaking down the project into discrete chunks. The rate of insight, depending on the behavior of a team, is inversely proportional. In that, a team member with an outstanding work ethic and demeanour requires the least oversight since he knows what is required of them at all times, and that enables them to be able to perform under minimum supervision. However, a team member who lacks such behavioral components will require utmost supervision to ensure everything proceeds as planned as they may cause the failure of the whole project if not adequately monitored.

Precedence Diagram Method

Precedence Diagram Method (PDM) is a visual representation technique that shows the activities involved in a project. It consists of the construction of a network diagram that makes use of nodes to represent activities and connects them to arrows to show dependencies. These network-scheduling techniques provide managers with a powerful tool for controlling and scheduling their projects or programs. Essentially, they allow for the graphic imaging of relationships and project activities among the activities. This provides the basis for identifying a possible reallocation of resources, predicting shortages, and is fundamental in determining the project’s critical path in solving problems. This plays a significant role in doing away with confusion that may result from the shortages, uncommunicated reallocations, among others, that may lead to conflict generation in the workplace (Hofmann, Sackmann & Betke, 2015). The managers are provided with control over schedules and activities, and current project or program status, as the network schedules are easy to update and rework by the readily available software. This makes it easier for the managers to manage their team, and to monitor the progress of every individual and adding extra resources in places that he deems weak or lagging. Besides the PDM happens to be a great communication tool too.

Role of Critical Path

Critical path plays an essential role in determining which tasks are more important in a project. One can visualize the critical path activities, the sequences and the task durations when the critical path is displayed as a bar chart, such as a Gantt chart. However, they are easy to identify in the Smart sheet as the critical path lines are outlined in red, thus providing a higher insight level into the correlation between tasks and the timeline of your project. It helps one to determine the task durations that need adjustments and those that need to be maintained. If the aim is to complete the project in a shorter period, then there is, need to determine the tasks that are best for time adjustment. Additionally, the critical path provides enhanced visibility and a clear direction into what is next, and whose responsibility it is (Kelleher, 2003). Once these ownership expectations and the critical tasks are identified, then the undivided attention from the lack of direction, or competing priorities. Through this, the manager will be in a better position to allocate the resources given that everyone understands what is expected of them and the tasks they are responsible for handling.

References

Kelleher, A. H. (2003). An investigation of the expanding role of the critical path method by ENR's top 400 contractors (Doctoral dissertation, Virginia Tech).

Motoyama, T. (2008). U.S. Patent No. 7,406,432. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Hofmann, M., Sackmann, S., & Betke, H. (2015). Using Precedence Diagram Method in Process-Oriented Disaster Response Management. In ISCRAM.