Project Management 2

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CEPM502: Planning and Managing Resources

What you'll do

Use strategies to deal with overly optimistic estimates Assess the appropriate considerations and project attributes in deciding how much to level a schedule Perform resource leveling Identify critical resources for a project Make sound decisions as to whether (or not) to crash specific activities or to fast-track them to support schedule compression analysis Use strategies for mitigating scope-, hope-, effort- and team-member scope creep

Course Description

Research shows that a high percentage of projects take significantly longer than expected and cost

more than anticipated. Moreover, if you ask people for an estimate of how long a task will take them to complete, their estimate will usually be overly optimistic. Sometimes, if you bring in extra people to try to help with a task, that actually slows down progress

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instead of accelerating it. Why is this? And what can you do about it? You will examine these questions in this course, with Linda K. Nozick, Professor and Director of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. You will also identify strategies to integrate resource availability constraints into project planning, scheduling, and control.

This course is designed for seasoned project managers who seek better practical results to align available resources with tasks and bring activities to completion on time. Students will examine compression strategies to help bring a project that's running late back on track and will explore how to handle common types of project creep, such as customer requests that require extra time and team members who decide to invest extra effort in a task. This course addresses formal project management mechanisms with particular emphasis on the human element: what can project managers do to resolve issues brought about in the normal course of working with customers, team members, and stakeholders?

Linda K. Nozick Professor and Director of Civil and Environmental Engineering College of Engineering, Cornell University

Linda K. Nozick is Professor and Director of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. She is a past Director of the College Program in Systems Engineering, a

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program she co-founded. She has been the recipient of several awards, including a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Clinton for "the development of innovative solutions to problems associated with the transportation of hazardous waste." She has authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications, many focused on transportation, the movement of hazardous materials and the modeling of critical infrastructure systems. She has been an associate editor for Naval Research Logistics and a member of the editorial board of Transportation Research Part A. She has served on two National Academy Committees to advise the US Department of Energy on renewal of their infrastructure. During the 1998-1999 academic year, she was a Visiting Associate Professor in the Operations Research Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Professor Nozick holds a B.S. in Systems Analysis and Engineering from the George Washington University and an M.S.E and Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Author Welcome

So, I'm glad you've decided to join us for this course. This course will help you understand the connection between project schedules and resources and also some of the social issues— some of the behavioral issues that surround humans as part of projects.

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Table of Contents

Module 1: Flex Schedules and Resources to Your Advantage

1. Module Introduction: Flex Schedules and Resources to Your Advantage

2. Watch: Schedules and Why They Matter 3. Watch: Resources and Schedules 4. Scheduling Challenges 5. Watch: Options When You Level a Schedule 6. Watch: How Much to Level? 7. Watch: The Results of Leveling 8. Course Project, Part One: Flexing Schedules and Resources

to Your Advantage 9. Module Wrap-up: Flex Schedules and Resources to Your

Advantage

Module 2: Use Critical Project Management Tools

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6. Watch: Fast-Tracking and Schedule Compression 7. Watch: Crashing 8. Tool: The Fast-Tracking and Crashing Worksheet 9. Course Project, Part Two: Using Critical Project Management

Tools 10. Module Wrap-up: Use Critical Project Management Tools

Module 3: Manage Scope, Creep, and the Unknown

1. Module Introduction: Manage Scope, the Creeps, and the Unknown

2. Read: Managing the Unknown 3. Watch: The Planning Fallacy 4. Tool: Address the Planning Fallacy 5. Watch: Brooks' Law 6. Read: Scope-, Hope-, Effort-, and Team-Member-Scope

Creep 7. Managing the Creeps 8. Course Project, Part Three: Managing Creep, Scope, and the

Unknown 9. Module Wrap-up: Manage Scope, the Creeps, and the

Unknown 10. Read: Thank You and Farewell

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Module 1: Flex Schedules and Resources to Your Advantage

1. Module Introduction: Flex Schedules and Resources to Your Advantage

to Your Advantage 9. Module Wrap-up: Flex Schedules and Resources to Your

Advantage

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Module Introduction: Flex Schedules and Resources to Your Advantage

In the final analysis, project management is very complex. It requires careful monitoring and control of the details—it's not easy; that's why a high percentage of projects run longer than anticipated and cost more than planned. Customers will

change their minds about what they want, tasks will take longer than people estimated, and skilled resources won't always be available for your project when you thought they would. For a seasoned project manager working with an experienced team, however, are schedules even necessary? People on your team know how to do their jobs, after all; you have a series of identified tasks, and team members can be trusted to work on them as expediently as possible. In this module, Professor Nozick explains why the advantages for project managers of working with schedules cannot be overstated. This module also allows you to examine strategies for working with schedules—aligning and realigning available resources to tasks—and using different options for leveling schedules so you can meet your critical goal: bringing projects to completion on time and on budget. You will have an opportunity to discuss scheduling challenges with your peers, and you will complete part one of your course project, in which you leverage the lessons of past experience for improved future performance.

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Watch: Schedules and Why They Matter

If you're an experienced project manager, you know all the tasks that need to get done and you have assigned resources to tasks. Is it necessary to create project schedules? In this video, Professor Nozick makes a practical case for the benefits of using schedules to run projects effectively.

Transcript

So, why is a project schedule needed? Why not just create a list of tasks and assign them and be done with it? Well, in reality, a project schedule is really much, much more than an assignment of people to tasks. It certainly includes the information from the work breakdown structure—namely, a task list and a hierarchy between those tasks—but that's not all that it includes. It also includes task duration information, it gives information about the dependencies between tasks—that is, what tasks need to be completed before other ones can begin. And this is critical to running the project effectively.

Also, it puts a timeline to tasks. That helps us understand how to assign resources to those tasks so that the project moves smoothly. A project timeline is absolutely critical to communicating with all stakeholders when you're running the project; not just the client, not just the program manager— who the project manager reports to— but also team members. So that timeline is very, very important and it's the basis of many discussions as the project evolves.

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It's also a critical tracking tool for the progress of the project. As tasks complete on the project, you'll update your project schedule. As tasks lag behind, it'll be your visibility into how to address those delays. So, the idea that this project schedule is a living document and changes as the project executes— that's very, very important. Without a project schedule, it's virtually impossible to understand what the impact of a delay on one task will mean to the other tasks on the project and, therefore, into the resource schedule that you have in mind, okay? And that you've explicitly made in the project schedule. It also gives you a good mechanism to track the expenses that have been incurred on the project, against the work that's actually been completed on the project. That's a critical part of controlling your project. So, an important question that comes up very frequently is, well, do all projects really need a schedule or is that really just for big projects or complex projects? What if I have a small project?

Well, the answer to that question is really, no matter what the size of the project is, you're going to need a project schedule. Part of that is just to make sure everyone's on the same page. The good news in terms of project scheduling—if it's a small project— is, the effort that you have to put in to create that project and to update that project, well, it's proportionately easier if the project is smaller rather than larger. But there's no way to really get around having a project schedule and really being able to—at the same time— control your project. Project managers, project team members with good experience, really do understand the importance of a project schedule.

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So, there's really no issue of understanding why this is important among many of your stakeholders. However, as new members, young members, move on to a team, they may have less of an understanding of why it's so important to have a project schedule and why it's so important for them to continually be communicating progress on their tasks so that the schedule can be updated. You just need to be sensitive to this and help bring them into the system of being a member—an effective member—of a project team.

That's really the only moral to the story. You've got to be sensitive to where they're coming from, but over time they will also learn the importance of a project schedule. And also the Gantt chart, which comes out of the project schedule— that's going to be the basis of much communication as the project proceeds. And you're not going to have a Gantt chart without a project schedule.

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Watch: Resources and Schedules

As you think about how to assign people to tasks, you need to consider complex variables, such as existing precedence constraints, which people are best suited to do the tasks at hand, and whether people have a steady flow of work.

Transcript

So, resources. Resources are the people and things that are needed to get the project done. Things can include a variety of items including materials— different kinds of materials— equipment, and facilities. When you think about people as resources, you have to think about their skills. So, when you're thinking about scheduling a project and then assigning resources — assigning people to some of the different activities—you have to think about what their intrinsic skills are that they will be bringing to the project and make sure it matches the tasks that you are assigning them to.

Also, the timing for each resource is critical to project management and program management. As the project manager, it is obvious why the timing of when you will need resources is important to you. You see your task schedule, you see the requirements for each of those tasks, and therefore, you see who you might need to do those activities. If you're the program manager you're one level up in the organization, and you're looking across a bunch of different projects and trying to figure out how your resources will be balanced across all of them. And, of course, that means that you

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care very deeply about what each of the project managers is doing with respect to their own activities and, therefore, with respect to each of the resources that they will use over the course of the project.

So, that brings up an important question. When you schedule tasks, often times there's some leeway in how you're going to schedule those tasks over time. Certainly you have to pay attention to resource requirements and availabilities, you have to pay attention to precedence constraints. But even within that, there's often some judgment about how to actually sequence the activity.

So, here's a example. In this case I have three activities. Activity A, which takes two time periods or two days to complete and requires two units of a resource. Activity B, it takes three days to complete and requires two units of a resource as well. That means those two units of resources have to be available during the entire three periods, or three days, that the activity is active. And the final activity is activity C, that takes five days to complete and requires four people during the time that it's active. Okay, so, one thought is to do this as a left-justified schedule. What does that mean? Well, left-justified means each activity is scheduled at its earliest possible time, given precedence constraints.

So, in this example, in fact, there are no precedence requirements. All three activities can start at the same time— at the very beginning of the project. That leads to a graph of resource use over time like the following. So, if you look at activity C, it starts in time period one— zero, at the very beginning of the project— ends

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in time period five, and has four people assigned to it throughout the entire duration. Activity B also starts at the beginning of the planning horizon. It's active between—from the beginning of the planning horizon all the way to the end of day three. And it takes two people to use— two people for every period that it's active.

And, finally, activity A, which takes two periods to do and requires two people the entire time it's active. And, so, you can see that the maximum number of people I will need is eight. But notice that those eight people aren't busy the entire five days. In fact, if you think of starting at time period day two, in fact, two people are now not needed for the rest of the project. If you look at time period three for the remaining two days, there's another two people that are also idle. Those people could be offered to the program manager for use on other projects, for example. An alternative schedule is the one where you do activity C starting at the very beginning of the planning horizon and activity A. A will then end at the end of the second day, and activity C will end at the end of the fifth day.

As of day two, you can now start activity B, because two people have been freed up from activity A. That brings the peak number of people that you need down from eight to six, and, in fact, now you can keep those six people busy the entire five days the project is active. Now, there are some advantages to this. As a project manager, one of the most important things you can do is keep very good team members happy so they want to keep working for you in the future. They are happy when there are a very steady stream of work, they know what's expected, and they enjoy it. When you

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move people around a lot they get less comfortable, okay? And they can get anxious. And, so, some of your better people may not want to live in a world that's very tumultuous.

So, in some perspective, in fact, the second schedule is far better, because you've now got everybody busy on your project all the time, assuming the people that can do activity A are the same ones that can do activity B. That's a very attractive idea. So, as you think about assigning people to projects, think about it from the team members' perspective and how will they feel about that schedule. A schedule which has them bouncing around a lot is not generally one that they're going to enjoy very much. So, that's an important thing to think about.

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Scheduling Challenges

Discussion topic:

Scheduling appropriately within a project or across projects, with changing resource availability and fluctuating needs, is a constant challenge for project managers. Create a post in which you respond to the following:

1. What do you find to be most challenging about scheduling? Offer 1-2 examples of why this is a difficult challenge in your experience.

2. What's your experience with reallocating resources to fit project needs? Share 1-2 of your own ideas or best practices.

Instructions:

Click Reply to post a comment or reply to another comment. Please consider that this is a professional forum; courtesy and professional language and tone are expected. Before posting, please review eCornell's policy regarding plagiarism (the presentation of someone else's work as your own without source credit).

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Watch: Options When You Level a Schedule

Leveling a schedule, as Professor Nozick explains, means that you are being appropriately flexible to achieve an end goal: you're realigning human resources to match scheduling demands.

Transcript

So, a resource level schedule is a schedule for which the supply of a resource over time matches the demand for that resource implied by the schedule. The process of adjusting a schedule to make this true is the process of leveling a schedule and it's actually quite a complicated thing to do. For instance, up to now we've assumed that task durations are fixed. This is not always true and this is one piece of the flexibility in leveling. For instance, sometimes the duration is fixed and you're required to have a certain amount of resources applied in a particular way during that duration of that activity. There's no choice.

For example, suppose your activity takes a certain task length time to do, maybe that's five time periods or five days. And it takes five people applied evenly over those five days. So, those five people are busy with that activity all five days. And it has to be applied exactly that way; those five people need to be available all five days that it's active. That's a very rigid way to run the task. And it could be that that's required to do the task well. You could also have a fixed amount of resources that need to be applied to the task, but it doesn't really matter how they're applied. So, as an example, suppose it's the second case— fixed resources are

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required, but it doesn't matter how they're applied.

Think of our activity which is five days in length, and requires, effectively, five people when it's active, that is, 25 person days. Maybe it doesn't matter how those 25 person days are accumulated over the time that it's active. So, it could be that you could apply nine people for a day at the beginning and make a lot of progress. And then apply five people for the next three days, and then only one person for the last day to finish it up. Each of those plans is 25 person days long, but they're very different for when people need to be available. And whether or not you have this flexibility really has to do with how that activity— the kind of work that needs to be done for that activity. But certainly, if they have that flexibility, that does add a dimension of complexity to the leveling process.

Generally, just as a rule of thumb, it's better to use resources evenly over a project. That tends to be cheaper. So, being able to push down the spikes in your resource needs to be more level, generally that works better, both on a human side and on a financial side. It also ensures that you'll have no over-allocation of resources— too many people standing around and not enough work to do. So, again, leveling resources over time, that's a complicated activity. Because there's usually a lot of flexibility about how to do it. We talked on the resource side, it's also true on the activity tasks specification side. So, for instance, when you go level your resources, that is try to bring your resource availabilities into line with your project schedule, you might rethink your precedence constraints, because that may be a good way to level.

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For example, you might slide start dates around, you might modify your resource loadings over time, you might modify your task dependencies. For instance, suppose you're on a software project and you're going to do documentation and then testing. You might think about resource leveling and go, "You know, based on the skills I need in each one of those activities, I can actually do them in parallel more than I thought." And that will let me somehow level out the different skill sets that I have working at a given time. That is, maybe I'll do the testing over a longer period of time and have a little bit less unique bodies doing it. And the same with the documentation. I might also split up tasks.

For instance, instead of having testing as one long block where there's really no stopping, but the resources are being applied over time through that contiguous block, you might go, "Well, there's actually more flexibility here. I don't really have to go straight all the way through. And so I'm going to split up testing into two different activities: testing one and testing two." And maybe that will help me level in a nice way. Cause there's also other work going on at the same time. Now, tools like Microsoft Project are very useful to level. You can use them to automatically level for you. In practice, most of the time you're going to want to make modifications and so you can always—in tools—get a suggested level schedule and then manually manipulate it, or you can go to— usually they have a nice set of robust tools to manually do the leveling.

As you can see, though, from this discussion, there's no single resultant leveled schedule. It has a lot to do with which tradeoffs

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you want to make on how you want to apply your resources and the final structure for your project network. Generally, there's quite a few degrees of freedom on both sides of that and so there are many difficult schedules that are level that could be made to work. Which one's better for your organization? There's other issues there to make that decision.

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Watch: How Much to Level?

There are a number of factors to consider when it comes to leveling. Professor Nozick offers an illustrated example of how this concept works in practical application.

Transcript

So, let's walk through a few examples of thinking about leveling and how do we bring our schedule and our resource assignment into line with our resource availabilities. To do this, let's go back to our example from the previous video where we had three activities: A, B, and C. Activity A took two periods of duration, activity C took five periods of duration, activity B took three periods in duration. And activity A took two resources, C took four and B took two resources. And in this example, as I'm talking through it, we will make changes and discuss about how those resource assignments can be made to the activities. But, for the moment, let's think of activity A as requiring, effectively, four person days of resources, activity C requiring 20 person days of resources.

Now, one thought about how to do this is just a left-justified schedule. Since there are no precedence requirements, we can simply start each activity at the very beginning of the planning horizon. In which case, the duration of this project is five days long because activity C takes five periods to complete because it's four people and five time periods. Activity B takes three periods to complete because it's two people over three time periods. And activity A takes two periods to complete because it's two time

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periods and two people. So if we did that— our left-justified schedule— it'd take us five periods to finish it, or five days, and would require, at its peak, eight people involved. Of course, all those eight people are not needed across the entire project. Now, let's talk a little bit about actual resource assignments. And let's suppose we only have four people available. So my schedule, my left-justified schedule, is not resource feasible. It's precedence feasible, because there's no precedence requirements, but it's not resource feasible.

Let's also assume that the resource loadings to tasks over time are flexible; the total amount of person days of effort is known, but how it needs to be applied, while the task is active, that's up to us. That's part of the leveling process. That's part of our degrees of freedom in creating our schedule. So for task A, it requires four person days. We could do it with a half a person and take eight days to do it, that's okay. Because that means there's four person days that have been expended. For activity B, six person days are required. And for activity C, 20 person days. Now, you can imagine that there's a lot of choices of how we can now execute this project. Since we have four people available, one thought is simply to go as fast as we can on each activity, in order from A to B to C. So, since we have four people available, I need four person days for task A, one day and get it done. For task B, which would happen right after task A completes, a day and a half will take care of it with all four people focused on it. And finally, activity C takes five days to do if all four people are focused on it continuously. And so, then we get this new schedule, which is different than our old one.

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Another option is to say, "Okay, I want to do all three of those activities still kind of in parallel." Maybe there's no direct information that needs to be exchanged between them, but it's kind of nice to move in on them together for some reason. So suppose I said, for activity C, I'm going to assign two people to it. I need 20 person-days of effort; they can do that over ten days. For activity B, I'm going to assign one person to it and they're going to start at the beginning of the planning horizon. And since I'm only going to assign one person to it, it's going to take me six days to finish it. And for activity A, that takes four person days, I'm going to assign one person to it, starting at the beginning of the planning horizon, and that will now take four days to complete from the very beginning.

Now, I still have all four tasks, sorry, all three tasks going on in parallel, but they're slower because I've cut the per-period down of assignment. Third choice is, "Gee, maybe I'll focus most of my activity on C, because C is bigger— there's more work in it." So I'll have my three people working on it out of the four. Now, let that other person work on activity A and B in sequence until their activities are completed. And so, I get a schedule that looks like whats on the slide in front of you. Now the activity finishes in time period seven and a half.

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Watch: The Results of Leveling

Now you will examine what the implications of the leveling effort are. What does it mean for the project and for the schedule?

Transcript

So each of those three choices had different implications for the duration of the project. The one where we did A, B, and C in series took us seven-and-a-half days to do. The one where I assigned two people to activity C and then the remaining two people did activities A and B, starting at the beginning of the planning horizon, that took ten days to complete.

And my final choice which is three people going to activity C until it finishes at, on the sixth, two thirds of the way through the sixth day. And then A and B are executed in sequence, in series by the remaining fourth person. That took about seven and a half days to do. These are only three choices of many others. That are worth looking at. And that shows you the complexity of the leveling process. It's an illustration of it. Now, suppose that per period resource assignments, the activities are not flexible? That is for activity A. It's active for two time periods or two days. You must have two people assigned that entire two days.

Suppose for continuing on for activity B, that's active for three days, you must have two people assigned for each of those three days. And similarly for activity C that goes five days, and you must have four people assigned during that time. If I need to stay

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underneath my ceiling of four people, no more than four people Here's a couple of other choices about how to do it. Well I could start with activity C, do that for five days, and then do A and B together, that would be okay.

I could alternatively start with B and then start A, and then as A and B finish, start C. It's another way to do it. Okay, so these are all ways of leveling the schedule to comply with that four person limit on the resources that are available.

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Course Project, Part One: Flexing Schedules and Resources to Your Advantage

As you have seen, one of the great tools that project managers have available to them is the ability to rethink plans to meet changing circumstances. You may find that as work ebbs and flows, and as customer needs fluctuate, you need to revise your scheduling and resource allocation plans to meet the project's needs. This part of the course project will give you a chance to reflect on the experiences of the past and consider how you can do better in the future to align available resources to organizational needs. Completion of this project is a course requirement.

Instructions:

Download the "Planning and Managing Resources" course project, if you have not already done so. Complete Part One. Save your work. You will not submit your work now. You will submit your completed project at the end of the course for instructor review and credit.

Before you begin:

Review the grading rubric for this assignment. Please review eCornell's policy regarding plagiarism.

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Module Wrap-up: Flex Schedules and Resources to Your Advantage

You have now examined the practical reasons why schedules are necessary and have seen why project management requires careful monitoring and control of the details. People won't be available when you thought they would be, problems and project issues will arise, but as the project manager, you can do something about it. You have defined leveling a schedule and looked at some of the ways you can use leveling to bring about a better project outcome. You have explored strategies for working with schedules, aligning and realigning available resources to tasks, and using different options for flexing so that you can meet your critical goal: bringing projects to completion on time and on budget. You have now had an opportunity to discuss scheduling challenges with your peers, and you have completed part one of your course project, in which you leveraged the lessons of past experience for improved future performance.

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Module 2: Use Critical Project Management Tools

1. Module Introduction: Use Critical Project Management Tools 2. Watch: Schedules and the Critical Path Forward Pass 3. Watch: Schedules and the Critical Path Backward Pass 4. Watch: Resources and the Critical Sequence 5. Read: Reasons to Accelerate (or Compress) 6. Watch: Fast-Tracking and Schedule Compression 7. Watch: Crashing 8. Tool: The Fast-Tracking and Crashing Worksheet 9. Course Project, Part Two: Using Critical Project Management

Tools 10. Module Wrap-up: Use Critical Project Management Tools

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Module Introduction: Use Critical Project Management Tools

In this module, you will explore the critical path. The beauty of working with the critical path in the project network, for project managers, is that it helps you figure out where to focus your attention. This module examines activities in the critical path

and looks at methods of realigning available resources to complete those tasks. If your project is running late, you may need to accelerate some parts of it to bring it back on track. You will examine acceleration and compression strategies that can be used to modify schedules in trouble and you will access a helpful tool to guide your work in this area. You will also complete the second part of your course project, in which you will work with critical project management tools related to schedule control.

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Watch: Schedules and the Critical Path Forward Pass

You want to get your projects completed on time. When you think about the project network, you can think of the critical path forward pass as a mechanism to determine the earliest possible and latest possible start times for each activity so the project completes as soon as possible. Identifying those start times will help you determine when to assign people to work.

Transcript

Okay, so, we'll take a break from talking about resources for a moment and go back and talk about project duration where we don't consider resources. Then I'm going to add resources back into our discussion. So, the critical path method is a phenomenally good tool to try to understand project duration when there are no resource availability issues, okay? So, what you wind up doing in the critical path method, is you find the earliest and the latest start time for each activity so that the project completes as soon as possible. The activities for which the earliest start times and the latest start time are identical, those are the ones on the critical path.

So, lets walk through this calculation together. So, here's a project network. I have six activities. The numbers along the arcs are, in fact, the activity durations. So, the activity represented by the arc between node one and node two— that takes nine days to do.

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Okay, so let's compute the earliest start time for every activity, all six of them. So, we know the earliest start time for the activity that connects nodes one and two together. That's time period zero— the beginning of the planning horizon. And you'll notice, I have associated with every single node, two numbers. Only for node one is the earliest start time, or the earliest time you can reach that node, given. The rest are blank as of yet. We'll fill them in as we go through what's called the forward pass. That will give us the first number of the two. And then we'll do the backward pass, and that will give us the second number in the pair, for each one of those.

So, again, the activity that... connects node one to node two, that can start at time period zero. Based on that start time, we can reach node two in nine time periods because it takes nine time periods, or nine days, to complete the activity that connects one with two. We can reach node four in two time periods. Now that I know the earliest start times for activities one to two and one to four, and the earliest time I can reach nodes two and four, I can now figure out the earliest time I can reach nodes three and five. So, for node three it's going to be nine plus three, which is 12. And for node five, it's going to be two plus five, which is seven. Now I'm in a position to compute the earliest time I can reach node six; the end of the project. So, if I take the top half via node three, it's going to take me 12 plus seven time periods to get there, or 19. If I need to use the— if I go along the lower path, it will take me seven plus nine, which is 16.

So, I cannot reach node six and be completed with the project until I take and handle the longest of the two, which gets me to node six

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via node three. That's going to happen last, compared to node five to six. Okay, I'm still going to do all the work of course, along the bottom path, but that's quicker for me to get to node six via that path. But I don't really complete node six until I've got both of them done, that is, all the work that goes along the northern path and the southern path. So, the earliest time I can reach node six is, in fact, time period 19 and it's governed by that top half.

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Watch: Schedules and the Critical Path Backward Pass

The backward pass is a very helpful mechanism for project managers. It helps answer the question: What's the latest date that we can allow a given activity to start and still complete the project on time?

Transcript

Now if I'm going to finish that project in 19 days, what's the latest time I can reach nodes three and node five? Well for node three, it's going to be 19 minus seven, or 12. And for node five, it's going to be 19 minus nine, which is 10, okay. Notice that node three—I have no flexibility. The earliest I can get there is time period 12, and the earliest time I'm going to start the activity that goes from three to six, it better be time period 12, or we're not going to make it by time period 19. For node five, there's a little bit of flexibility. I could arrive there time period seven, eight, nine, or 10, and be okay. Okay, and still not change—not jeopardize—that completion date, as long as that last period of activity only takes nine time periods.

Notice I've got some hedging words in here now. I didn't have them when I started this. I said activity that connects nodes one with node two takes time period nine. In practice, nothing is perfect and always goes on time and on schedule. So, the critical path method works on fixed durations known with certainty. Well the

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reality is, when you use it in real life, not much is usually known with certainty. So, this gives you a sense of how much flexibility you have across your project network and where that flexibility is when things don't go exactly according to plan. Okay, so I've now found the latest start times for the activities between three and node six. And the latest start time for the activity between nodes five and node six. I can now back up to nodes two and four.

So, for node two, I need to be starting the activity that goes between nodes two and three, no later than 12 minus three, or time period nine, or nine days into the project. The same is true for the activity that goes between nodes four and five. Ten minus five, or five— that's the last time— that's the latest time I can reach node four is time period five. And now I can go compute the earliest start time, sorry, the latest start time for the project. Namely, the time I start node one or can begin activities one to two and one to four. And that's time period zero, governed by that northern path. So, what's very important to notice when you look at this project network, is that the critical path is what connects one, two, three, and six together.

Notice the earliest start time, and the latest start time are all exactly the same. You have no flexibility. Anything that takes longer along that path will elongate the project duration. The same is not true along that lower path. We have some flexibility there. And so, if things run a little later on activities one to four, it's okay, as long as they don't run too late. If they go past time period five, you are now going to be elongating the duration of that project. Along the red path, any delays will elongate the project; that's why

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that's called the critical path. And that's a very, very important tool for a project manager to understand: in their project plan, what is the critical path? It gives them a sense of what tasks to be most mindful of. It doesn't mean you can ignore everything else, but it does give some sense of urgency to some tasks over others.

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Watch: Resources and the Critical Sequence

The critical path makes a fundamental assumption: when the schedule needs people to work on activities, they will be available. In reality, that won't always be the case. You will need other tools in place to accommodate resource availability, as Professor Nozick explains. For our purposes in this course, we'll examine the concept of the "critical sequence." This is a helpful concept for practical purposes, although not one defined by the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK).

Student notes:

The critical sequence is always equal to or longer than the critical path. The critical path, shown here in red, assumes there are no resource constraints. We're assuming for the purposes of this discussion that the resources will be available when we need them. (Of course, that will not always be the case in real life.)

Transcript

So, the critical path is a very useful calculation to do on a project network. But it completely ignores resource availabilities. So, in our previous example, we saw that it took nine days to complete that project. That's based on the notion, whatever resources are needed for each of those activities is available. What if that's not true? And then, how does that impact the critical path? Because the concept of the critical path is really useful: the idea of giving

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project managers an idea of where to focus some of their attention.

So, suppose I have two resources: A and B, and I have one of each. And each activity requires one or the other, but not both. So, the activity that connects nodes one and two together that goes for nine days, that requires resource type A. And the one that connects nodes two and three together, that requires resource of type B. So, as you notice across that network, for each activity we know what resource is required. And we assume that that resource is applied uniformly throughout the time that that task is active. Okay, so, we have our critical path. What does that mean for resource loading, ignoring the availability for a moment? Okay? So, if you look at the graph at the bottom, that graph shows you days on the horizontal axis and along the vertical it's my two resources, A and B. If I do that activity— all those activities effectively at their earliest start time— I get the picture in the graph below on that slide.

Now, there's a problem with that. We have tremendous resource conflicts. I only have one resource of type A but you notice I've scheduled the activities that connect nodes one and two and nodes one and four to go on at the same time. So, in those first two days of the planning horizon, I've overused resource A. I need two of them, I only have one. I have a similar problem when you look a little further down the timeline and you see that activity five, six is going on at the same time as the activity that connects one with two and the activity that connects three with six. And that's a problem. So, we need to think about addressing that, and we need to figure out how to create a schedule that's more in line with the

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resource availabilities. So, one thought about how to do that, one reasonable thought—I only have one unit of each resource available— is I'll go ahead and I'll execute the activity that connects nodes one and node two together, okay. So, at the very beginning of the planning horizon I start activity one to two.

And then, once that's completed, I go ahead and do the activity that connects two and three together, and at the same time, I also start the activity that connects one and four together, okay? So, I'm prioritizing the top path over the lower path, but I'm doing it as its resource feasible, okay? And then, once I'm done with the activity two to three from resource B, I can then pop back up and do the activity that connects three and six together. That completes the top path, but I haven't finished the bottom path, so my project is not over yet, right? I still need to complete, at that point, the activity that connects five with six because that requires resource A, and that's just become free as I've finished the activity that connects three with six. So what was a 19 day project is now substantially longer; it's now 28 days. So, no longer do I have a critical path anymore. I now have what you could call a critical sequence that's both resource feasible and precedence feasible. That is, I'm looking at activities one to two, then two to three, then three to six, then five to six, because they're governing the duration of my project.

So, in summary, take a look at the resource left-justified, resource over schedule from the critical path method, and then going left- justified. And you can see the resource conflicts I have. And then on the bottom of that slide, to the right, you can see my critical

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sequence focused schedule. Notice how much longer my critical sequence is than my critical path was. Okay, the critical sequence will always be longer—equal to or longer than the critical path. It will be equal if, in fact, you had enough resources to fully staff the project and nothing was in conflict with anything else.

In this case that's not, this is not what's happened. We have a direct conflict for resource A— both paths need it, okay? And balancing out those needs creates a longer project duration than we intended initially, or we thought we would have initially, based on critical path method alone.

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Read: Reasons to Accelerate (or Compress)

• "Fast tracking" means assigning tasks to be done in parallel

• "Crashing" means assigning more resources to a given task

There are good reasons why a project manager might try to accelerate or compress a project schedule. Fast-tracking (realigning the work so that more tasks are done in parallel, rather than in sequence) and crashing (increasing the number of people dedicated to work on a task) are two important managerial strategies that are focused on shortening the project schedule or the project duration. The object is to modify the initial schedule or to address a schedule that's now running late.

There are many reasons that a project might be running late and there are many reasons that a project manager might try to accelerate the activities so that it gets back on track. One reason your project might be running late is that the original timeline might have been very optimistic. Some tasks may have needed to take longer. It could be that there were unanticipated technical difficulties that delayed task completion or something didn't work as well as anticipated, requiring a time-consuming fix. Changes to personnel can also affect schedule; an activity that the project manager thought would be relatively quick is taking longer

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because the new person doesn't have the same expertise that the previous person did.

Project managers might also choose to try to compress a schedule that's not actually behind. The landscape of work is constantly changing, and that will affect project management efforts. For example, the customer may need the project results delivered more quickly than had been anticipated. Something may have changed in their competitive landscape and they request that your team now finishes the project sooner. Another example could be that new work is coming in to your organization and some of the resources that you will need for the new work are still actively involved with an older project, and so there's a need to accelerate the first project to get it out of the way. Or, there may have been new goals set that change the project needs, or someone got promoted and moved into another job, so a project manager will try to accelerate some pieces of the project so that they can be finished before those personnel changes happen.

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Watch: Fast-Tracking and Schedule Compression

Professor Nozick examines one way to help a project that has gone off track in terms of its schedule: you can rethink your plans for how some of the work will be executed. Fast-tracking allows you to look for opportunities to move some of the activities that had been planned in sequence to be done in parallel instead.

Transcript

So, fast-tracking is one mechanism to try to move the project ahead quicker. The core idea there is to try to re-think how the work is being done along the critical path. And maybe there are some opportunities to do more of that work in parallel, so the critical path becomes shorter, okay? We focus on the critical path because that's the path where there's quote unquote quote "no extra time," no float. There's no extra time that isn't needed to get the actual work done that's available. As you accelerate the work along the critical path, of course, eventually, other paths might become critical, so you need to watch that. You can't just shorten the critical path very, very small and assume that that's still the critical path.

So, let's go back to our example from the previous video. In this example we had six activities and, in this case, we actually had a project—a critical path— a critical sequence, not just a critical path. I'm going to talk about fast-tracking in the context of a critical

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sequence instead of just the critical path, just to highlight for you that resources really do matter and the critical path method is an extremely important tool, but we always have to think about how the resource loading will occur and see if it really is still just the critical path you need to worry about or it's evolved into a sequence of activities that may not form a path. In this last example, it was actually a critical sequence of activities that are not a single path.

Okay, so, in this case, the critical activities are highlighted in red. And when we think about fast-tracking, we think about looking at the work packages in each of those activities and asking, "Hmm, could I have parallelized more of that work than I have?" Okay, so, for sake of argument, let's look at the activity that connects nodes one and two and then also the activity that connects two with three. Right now these are going to be done in series. What if we could make them a little bit more in parallel? So, in fact, activity that connects two with three actually can start before the activity that connects one with two completes. Okay? The base line has Activity B, in fact, idle until I completely finish the activity one to two. Maybe we can get B working earlier.

Let's see. So, the top of this slide shows the original schedule, okay? The bottom shows, "But what happens if I really only have one period of idleness on activities A's part? So, what happens if I split up activity one to two, into two pieces? One that takes eight and one that takes only a single day. Okay. And then I now schedule it along those ideas. Now activity that connects two with three can start the moment the first eight periods are done of the

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activity that connects one with two.

So, now I can modify the project network and now it looks like this. I've inserted, effectively, one new node and relabeled one node. So, now the project network has a activity that connects node one with node 2A, and that's eight periods long, and it's eight days worth of the work that went with the original activity from one to two. Now I have another arc, or another activity, that connects 2A with three, that's that remaining one day of effort on the original activity that connects node one with two. And now I also have an activity that connects node 2B with activity—with node 3. That's the work represented by the original activity between 2 and 3. And I've inserted a dash line between activities for node 2A and 2B. That's what we call a dummy activity and it takes no resources up. That leads to the schedule on the left hand side.

And notice, now, I've shrunk my schedule by one day. That ability to do some of the work in parallel allowed me to close up the gap on activity—on resource A's time: they had a day free, now they don't. Now I have been able to compress the schedule by one day. But in order to do that I had to rethink the work in those two activities and ask myself, "Is it logical that some of that could be done in parallel?" If the answer to that is no, you're not going be able to fast-track in that way. If the answer is yes, then you have an opportunity, okay.

And notice, the amount that I could get of benefit was really driven by all the other activities and how they're being assigned to the resources available. I could try to fast-track some more and see if I could do more things in parallel, for instance, but activities that

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connects nodes three and six and nodes five and six—but I really only have one person, okay. So there's other issues with trying to fast track those two together, in terms of having enough resources available.

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Watch: Crashing

As you have seen, fast-tracking is one way to move project work ahead faster. It requires rethinking the work you had planned and realigning people to work on some tasks in parallel. Professor Nozick examines another mechanism of moving work ahead faster: crashing.

Note: Will crashing always increase costs? Crashing does not automatically increase activity costs, unless the added resource has a higher labor cost than the one originally assigned. You are not doing more work, just getting the original scope completed sooner. But when you think about crashing, labor cost is something you want to pay attention to; if your only crashing option is adding in a more expensive resource than the one you had originally planned for, that's something to consider.

Transcript

So, crashing is another way to think about shortening your project. And the core idea for crashing is to add extra resources to make the schedule shorter. Okay. So, when we fast-tracked we didn't necessary add any new resources. In fact, we didn't. We just allowed more things to happen in parallel versus in series.

Okay. So, fast-tracking, nominally, doesn't cost more. Crashing generally will because you're adding more resources. Just like with fast-tracking, as you add resources to the activities along the critical path, you have to look—or critical sequence—you need to

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look at other paths and make sure nothing else is going to become critical, to the point where your wasting resources along the critical path because it's no longer critical. So, here's an example of crashing. So, the top figure is our resource assignments on our baseline schedule. Now, suppose what seems to really be hanging up this project is resource type A. If we had a second person that could do activity A, we'd go a lot faster.

So, one way to crash— it's obvious in this schedule— is to say, "What happens if I went out and got another resource A and made that available?" Well, if I did that I could really shrink my project duration. Because now I could work on the activities that connect node one with two and the activities that connect node one with four together at the same time. The same is true with activities that connect node three with six and nodes five with six. Now I can make the schedule a lot shorter but I'm going to pay a price for it. It's not cheap. I need a new resource A available to me to make that all work.

So, fast-tracking and crashing; they're both very important ways to think about accelerating a schedule that's either too long initially, or is falling behind and you want to catch up. Fast-tracking focuses on rethinking the work, so that more is done in parallel. Crashing is all about adding extra resources so that more work can then be done in parallel. Now, it's important— there's a subtle thing here. Fast-tracking; since you're rethinking your work and you're doing more in parallel, you may be inserting more risk into your project plan. You need to pay attention to that.

What happens if you decide, I can fast track; I'm going to start

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putting things in parallel. And then you're finding out, "Well, gee. Now I have a chicken or the egg problem between the activities that are going on at the same time." Each one is looking for something. Okay, so that's a risk. And fast-tracking, in general, is no more expensive unless some of those risks come to fruition, in which case it may turn out to be—add some costs. Crashing is generally more expensive because you're explicitly adding resources to your project.

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Tool: The Fast-Tracking and Crashing Worksheet

• Use the Fast-Tracking and Crashing Worksheet

What do you do when a project schedule is running late? You may need to work together with team members and managers to try to bring the project back on track. It may be helpful to use the downloadable tool on this page to guide the group conversations you have and critical decisions you make regarding schedule compression. Download the worksheet and save it for future reference. You can use it in your project-management team meetings and when working with project team members. It will help you identify whether the problems on a particular project offer a good opportunity to use the mitigation strategies of fast-tracking or crashing.

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https://s3.amazonaws.com/ecornell/content/CEPM/CEPM502/CEPM502_Tool_Fast_Tracking_and_Crashing.pdf

Course Project, Part Two: Using Critical Project Management Tools

Being able to work with available resources and to level a schedule in order to meet project demands is a critical capability for project managers. In this part of the course project, you will practice leveling a schedule so it's consistent with known resource availabilities. You will identify the earliest start times for activities and consider both the critical path and critical sequence, and how those relate to resource allocations. Completion of this project is a course requirement.

Instructions:

Download the "Planning and Managing Resources" course project, if you have not already done so. Complete Part Two. Save your work. You will not submit your work now. You will submit your completed project at the end of the course for instructor review and credit.

Before you begin:

Review the grading rubric for this assignment. Please review eCornell's policy regarding plagiarism.

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https://s3.amazonaws.com/ecornell/content/CEPM/CEPM502/CEPM502_course_project.docx

https://s3.amazonaws.com/ecornell/global/eCornellPlagiarismPolicy.pdf

Module Wrap-up: Use Critical Project Management Tools

The critical path, as you have seen, helps project managers figure out where to put the most attention. In this module, you worked with the critical path and the critical sequence and considered their implications for schedule monitoring and control. You have looked at methods of realigning available resources to work on the critical path. You have also explored some mechanisms for accelerating or compressing a schedule for a project running late. You accessed a helpful tool to guide your team work and management conversations to help you determine whether fast-tracking or crashing are appropriate strategies for your project. You also completed the second part of your course project, in which you worked with critical project management tools related to schedule control.

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Module 3: Manage Scope, Creep, and the Unknown

1. Module Introduction: Manage Scope, the Creeps, and the Unknown

2. Read: Managing the Unknown 3. Watch: The Planning Fallacy 4. Tool: Address the Planning Fallacy 5. Watch: Brooks' Law 6. Read: Scope-, Hope-, Effort-, and Team-Member-Scope

Creep 7. Managing the Creeps 8. Course Project, Part Three: Managing Creep, Scope, and the

Unknown 9. Module Wrap-up: Manage Scope, the Creeps, and the

Unknown 10. Read: Thank You and Farewell 11. Stay Connected

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Module Introduction: Manage Scope, the Creeps, and the Unknown

Which of these scenarios sound familiar to you? After work begins, the customers change their mind about what they want. A team member falls behind, but doesn't mention it to you because he believes he can catch up. People underestimate

how long tasks will actually take to complete. For seasoned project managers, these scenarios are all too familiar. They can add up to significant delays and cost overruns. But what can you do about it?

As the project manager, you can anticipate that these things will happen and you can use recommended strategies for addressing them. In this module, you will focus on managing those little changes along the way that accumulate to send projects over time and over budget. You will access a helpful tool that you can use to get better estimates of how long tasks will actually take. You will discuss with your peers the best project management strategies in this area, and you will explore what the research says about bringing in more people to help. Is it always the best answer, or does it sometimes backfire?

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Read: Managing the Unknown

• Project managers need to try to anticipate what might go wrong and plan for it

• Continually analyzing your schedule for vulnerabilities will make it easier to cope when unexpected problems arise

Managing resources is very complicated, and the more you think about contingencies the better off you will be. At the beginning of a project, you can look at the work breakdown structure. Some tasks are well known, well understood, and the resource needs are clear. Think of those tasks as "known knowns."

Other tasks are more ambiguous. When you look at the task description, and the resource needs over time are there for estimates because the task itself is ambiguous, that implies some risks. Think of those tasks as" known unknowns." You know that you don't know. That's an important piece of information.

There are other known unknowns. The schedule as a whole is a baseline and it will need to be revised over time. Because you don't know the exact work that will need to be done under a few of those tasks, you won't know the exact resources those tasks will

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consume. You won't know the exact duration. You will make some logical estimates, you'll get a baseline, and as time goes on, you will revise the project schedule, but you can reliably assume that some revisions will need to be made.

it is also important to realize there are "unknown unknowns," or things that may happen that you couldn't have anticipated. Those unknown unknowns may change your project schedule. For instance, someone with a critical skill might leave the organization or become ill. A technology that you assumed would be available isn't available. Your customer's needs have evolved, so the work will have to evolve. All of these are examples of unknown unknowns. It's hard to plan for obstacles that you don't know will arise, but they'll necessitate an evolution in the schedule.

It's important to continually analyze your evolving schedule (and the implied resource allocations) for vulnerabilities. That ongoing analysis will make it much easier to cope with unexpected situations as they occur—or the unknown unknowns that just pop up.

Here are a few common schedule risks to think about:

The project schedule has been made with "rose-colored glasses," meaning with great optimism. Sometimes you don't get a really good estimate for how long certain activities will take because the people doing the estimates are overly optimistic about what they can accomplish. This can cause the project to run longer than anticipated, change your resource allocations, and have you scrambling to get these activities done.

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Your re-estimation of effort is not as accurate as you would like. It could be that when you calculated your effort for a given activity, you used person hours, and the person you had in mind is very efficient. You could end up in a situation where the person who is actually available is not as efficient. A team member doesn't understand what their responsibilities are in a timely fashion, so they do not spend their time as productively as you had anticipated. The work breakdown structure you created to do the project was incomplete. Something hadn't been anticipated and yet it needs to be done. Hiring for the project turns out to be harder than you thought. This means that critical people aren't available at the time that you figured they would be when you leveled your schedule. Interpersonal issues may arise between team members. Lots of problems on projects are actually not technical in nature, but are, instead, human issues. The project scope expands. The work that you initially think needs to be done within a project actually increases over time. The target completion date for the project changes due to evolving customer needs. A contractor doesn't deliver some of the work you need for the project on time, or it's of insufficient quality. The funds you had planned to use to run the project are not all available on time, and so things fall behind.

As you can see, there are many reasons you might wind up having to revisit and revise your project schedule. Understanding that these things can happen, and making sure as you look at your

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project schedule you think ahead to what might go wrong, will be critical. It's hard to identify the unknown unknowns at the beginning, but the more familiar you are with your opportunities to get back to a given baseline schedule, the better off you'll be.

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Watch: The Planning Fallacy

You probably already know, intuitively, that people are often overly optimistic about how long it will take them to complete their work. That optimism creates schedule difficulties. Why people are overly optimistic in estimates has been the subject of insightful published research, as Professor Nozick explains.

Transcript

So, when we're doing project work or trying to create a project schedule, we have to do a lot of planning. And a lot of that planning focuses around how long it will take to do work. Many times when you estimate how long it will take to do some work you can be unnecessarily optimistic. For instance, let's go back to an example everybody has in the recesses of their memory from when they were in high school: writing a paper. I bet you can remember times when you estimated how long it would take to do a piece of homework, like write a paper, and you found out it took far longer.

So, as an example, when you make your plan and you're going to write your paper, you might go a little way into doing that paper and realize, "Gee, some of the material I need to do the research to support the paper I need to order from a different library." It will take time to get that. It makes writing the paper— completing the step—much longer. You might decide that the initial thesis you had for your paper has some flaws in it and now you need to rethink it. That could make writing the paper take longer than you thought.

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Something else might happen in another course. Suppose you're working on a project for a different course and there are some issues with the team dynamics for that project and so now you have to devote more time to that project.

Now you're not finishing your paper as quickly as you thought. In the real world, in the work world, this idea that it takes longer to do some of the work than you initially thought, that also is applied to financial estimates for how much money it will take. That's also been seen as well. It's not just in the time it takes to complete a project, but also the financial estimates of how much it will take to complete a project. So, of the many examples in the work domain, big construction projects like the big dig in Boston, the Channel tunnel between London and Paris; both of those took way longer than expected and cost a lot more. You don't have to look very far in terms of construction projects to find ones that took much longer than anticipated and cost substantially more.

The Standish Group—that's an organization that publishes surveys on the performance of information technology projects. They noted on survey projects between 2010 and 2014, over 50% of the projects costs more than 180% of their original estimates. McKinsey & Company did a similar report on large IT projects and they found about 45% of them ran over budget, 7% over time, and deliver 56% less value than expected. So, the planning fallacy is alive and well. Kahneman and Tversky first coined the term, "the planning fallacy," back in 1979 to describe this kind of behavior of being overly optimistic.

Now, what are the sources for the planning fallacy? Well, there's

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quite a few. One thought is, when individuals try to create these estimates, they create a scenario in their head about how they would do something. And then they give an answer to how long it will take based on that scenario in their head. That scenario doesn't tend to include what can go wrong. It's usually based on a successful outcome, okay. So, intrinsically, it has less content associated with what could go wrong. Also, since the person is so heavily focused on what they're going to do to complete the activities or what's going to happen to complete the activities, they tend to ignore other things that are also going on at the same time.

For instance, work on other projects they're involved in. Their social life. Their propensity to procrastinate. All of these affect the time that it will really take to finish the activity. Too little— they often put way too little reliance on past experiences, which might suggest longer durations. They're looking at the activity through this scenario, which tends to be rose-colored glasses, which often ignores what might go wrong. It's very understandable how we get there, and we get to these estimates that are too short. The question is what do we do about them? Because when you plan for something and don't leave an adequate amount of time, that becomes a very complicated situation to manage. So, some of the things you can do to address the planning fallacy include—it turns out the planning fallacy is more focused on you looking at how much time it will take you to do something. When you're starting to ask about the next person, that bias evaporates to a large degree.

So, asking someone else is one very useful mechanism to try to get a better estimate of how long something will take. Also, when

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there is historical data of how long something will take. If the person is just factoring it in as they create this scenario to whatever degree they choose to in a very implicit way, they're likely not to give it the real balance that it deserves. So, making those comparisons more explicit in the assessment, that's very important.

There's also this idea of a pre-mortem. Deborah Mitchell...Jay Russo at Cornell, Deborah Mitchell at Wharton, and Nancy Pennington at the University of Chicago— they identified that prospective hindsight, substantially increases the likelihood of correctly identifying the reason for a future outcome. That's a lot of thoughts but let's try to unpack it a little bit. So what's prospective highlight? That's imagining high— prospective hindsight. That's imagining a future event and then asking what caused it. Okay, so that gives us a mechanism: the idea of this pre-mortem. So, Gary Klein in his book, "The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work," he identifies a six- step process about how to use a pre-mortem to figure out what is a better estimate for the time it may take to do something.

So, for instance, you say to the person, instead of, "How long will this take?" "Imagine this takes this long. How did it become that long?" And then as the person goes through the process of trying to construct events that have that duration, you get much better feedback of how long that activity might take, or that project might take. Okay, so this idea of a pre-mortem: that's a very useful concept in how to structure the discussion of how long something will take to complete. And finally, it's very important that we have

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processes in place to monitor progress and encourage honesty so that we can identify issues faster.

Issues are going to happen. They are going to come up when you manage your projects. There is no doubt it will happen. The important thing is that people feel free to say they're running behind, and what it's taking them, and what they believe the hang up is so you can get in with interdictions as effectively and as quickly as possible. So, these processes for monitoring progress and encouraging honesty in the identification of issues by team members— that's a very important piece of addressing the planning fallacy.

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Tool: Address the Planning Fallacy

• The Address the Planning Fallacy Tool itemizes the recommended strategies

As Professor Nozick has discussed, research shows that a high percentage of projects take longer than expected and cost more than anticipated. It's easy to see how people create budget and duration estimates that are overly optimistic. The question is: what can you do about it? The four strategies outlined below are very effective in helping project managers achieve better results.

Strategy One: Ask Someone Else

The planning fallacy is focused on you, the individual, estimating how much time it will take you to do something. When you ask another person doing the same job task for an estimate, the personal bias evaporates to a large degree. Asking someone else to give their estimated duration is a very useful mechanism to try to get a more accurate and less biased estimate of how long something will take.

Strategy Two: Use Historical Data

You can make comparisons very explicit in your assessment by

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relying on historical data. How long have similar activities taken in the past? Using historical data removes that personal bias, reducing the effects of the planning fallacy.

Strategy Three: Use a "Pre-mortem"

Research conducted in 1989 by Deborah J. Mitchell, of the Wharton School; Jay Russo, of Cornell; and Nancy Pennington, of the University of Colorado, showed the benefits of using "prospective hindsight," which means imagining a future event and then asking yourself what caused it. That gives you a mechanism to anticipate what is likely to go wrong and to plan for it. Author Gary Klein, in his book, The Power of Intuition, recommends using your gut feeling to make better decisions at work. He identifies a six-step process about how to use a pre-mortem to figure out a better estimate for the time it may take to do something.

For example: instead of saying to a team member, "How long do you think this will take?" You would say, "Imagine this task takes this amount of time. What do you think would cause that extended duration?" And then as the person goes through the process of trying to think of the likely causes of interruptions and delays, you get much better insight into how long that activity will actually take. The idea of a pre-mortem is a very useful concept when you're trying to structure a discussion regarding how long something will take to complete.

Strategy Four: Processes

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It's very important to have processes in place to monitor progress and encourage honesty so that you can identify issues faster. Issues are going to happen. They are going to come up when you manage your projects. The important thing is that people feel free to say they're running behind, and why, and what they believe the hang-up is. That will give you the chance to implement interventions as effectively and as quickly as possible. Having sound processes for monitoring progress and encouraging honesty in the identification of issues by team members is a very important piece of addressing the planning fallacy.

"Back to the Future: the Role of Temporal Perspective in the Explanation of Events," Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2, 25-38: Mitchell, Deborah J., Russo, J. Edward, and Pennington, Nancy (1989). The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work (Gary Klein, Crown Business, 2004).

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Watch: Brooks' Law

Professor Nozick discusses a question that's very important to project managers: if a task is running late, can you resolve this problem by assigning more people to the task to accelerate progress?

Professor Nozick references "Brooks' Law," which is the observation that sometimes when person-power is added to a project it slows down progress rather than accelerates it, as well as the book in which the term was coined: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering; Brooks, Frederick P., Jr., Addison-Wesley Professional (1975, 1995)

Transcript

So, it's very common to talk about how many work hours or days are needed to do something. This leads to the thought that if I double the number of people assigned I can halve the amount of time required. So, let's create an example. Suppose a task requires 40 hours to complete. Does that mean one person for one 40 hour work week and ten people for four hours each is sufficient? If I find that a task is running late can I simply assign more people and accelerate progress? That's a very important question. Brooks' law is an observation that sometimes, when person power is added to a project, it slows down progress rather than accelerates it.

The observations that underlied the coining of the term Brooks' law

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were made in the context of software projects but the warning to be on the look out for this possibility— that when you assign extra resources to make something go faster, in fact, it may go slower, is equally valid in other domains, not just software. Brooks' law first appeared in the book, "The Mythical Man-Month," written by Fred Brooks in 1975. Now, what could be causing this? Add more resources we think we'll go faster. So, let's think a little bit about what it might mean when you actually add more people to a project.

So, when more people are added to a project, the idea of communication— the amount of communication— between the individuals, that grows up very fast, right, because it goes with the number of connections there are from one person to all the other people. So, as you add more people, there's more connections, okay. All that time for communicating— that takes away effort from doing the actual work, okay? The graph here shows the number of people along the horizontal axis and along the vertical axis the number of connections. As we go from one person on a project with zero connections, to two people with one connection, and then you start going up to five, and then to 15, and then on, and on, and you can see how rapidly this is growing.

Another element that causes— probably underlies—the reality of Brooks' law, in some contexts, is that, as you add people to a project, those people may not know what's going on on the project, and now you have this issue of training. And who's going to bring those people up to speed, but the people who are on the project already, doing the work? Okay. And so, that can also slow down

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progress. So, we're going to be cautious that we're not saying "No. Don't ever add staff to a task which is falling behind." But be cognizant of what might be done to make that productive. That is, how do you control the processes of bringing the new people onto the team, getting them socialized into the team and into the workflow of the team, without delaying the work of everybody else who's on the project. That's an important thing to think about before adding lots of people to the activity.

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Read: Scope-, Hope-, Effort-, and Team- Member-Scope Creep

• Small, unanticipated changes to the project can add up to major cost overruns and delays

• Project managers can work with team members to mitigate the damage of any type of creep

"Creep" refers to a sequence of small changes that can accumulate to cause substantial difficulties in the execution of a project. Each small change on its own may seem so insignificant that it can be overlooked by project management. You may think that you can neglect the little changes that take place along the way, but if you don't address them as they accrue, and they continue to add up, they can create both tremendous changes in the schedule and serious cost overruns. So it's very important for you to figure out how to manage the different types of creep effectively.

Scope Creep

Scope creep is the uncontrolled expansion of the amount of work to be done on the project. Strictly speaking, it's any change in the

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project to be delivered that was not part of the original project plan. In general, scope creep is customer-driven and comes from trying to meet a new requirement that may not have been formally introduced into the system. It's driven by the customer or somehow done to please the customer. It's very important that the project manager understands the impacts of each one of these changes so that a decision can be made about whether or not the request will be accommodated and how it will happen. "How," in this case, means a timeline accommodation and likely a resource assignment accommodation. Just because it might please the customer to expand the work, it still affects the project and the organization; if it's important enough to be done, it needs to be done in a way that's consistent with resource availability and milestone timelines or the requests have to be modified.

Hope Creep

Hope creep is created by a team member. Sometimes a team member falls behind on a task, but they believe they can get back on schedule and make it on time. They make a conscious choice not to make the project manager aware of the difficulties. They're not doing it to be dishonest or malicious, or to cover up an imperfect performance. They're doing it because they genuinely think that they can get back to where they need to be without causing chaos for the project manager. In reality, many times that hope doesn't come to fruition and it turns out that the task runs late and affects the whole project. The real problem is that the project manager hasn't been made aware of it early enough to try to make accommodations. So, as the task goes late, other people are

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standing around waiting to begin other activities. Assignment changes need to be made quickly with a much smaller time window to make this transition a smooth one. It's very important for the project manager to verify progress reports made by team members and not simply collect status reports. You can ask for demos, you can walk through some pieces of the work project together, you can ask questions: How far are you? How did that step happen? That will give you reason to believe that what you're being told is, in fact, correct. And remember, it's not about maliciousness, it's about people genuinely trying to do their work and not wanting to disappoint anyone else on their team. That, really, is what leads to hope creep.

Effort Creep

Effort creep takes place when the progress on a project by a team member isn't proportional to the amount of effort they have expanded. It's taking longer than anticipated. For team members who appear to have this issue, it's important for the project manager to get frequent updates so he or she can identify any difficulties and try to get ahead of the problem. Effort creep can be caused by communication issues between team members. It can happen because of a slow interface between one activity and the next. It could be that the team member has a weakness in their skill set for a particular task and will need help to find a way to get that task done. It may be that the effort estimates for that activity were, in fact, too low, given the task complexity. The project manager just needs to know it and adjust accordingly. One of the critical tasks for a project manager is to refrain from assigning

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blame; the goal is to figure out as much as you can about how the team member got to this point so that you can help resolve the problem. To build trust with your team members, it is important to get a handle on these things as early as possible.

Team-Member Scope Creep

Team-member scope creep is also referred to as "gold plating." It happens when a team member (or members, plural) adds extra features to their work to please the customer or to illustrate their competence. Work is a source of pride for people. Being able to do something better than anticipated can make people feel very good. And the team members are probably not doing this to cause problems down the road, but they may not realize that when they add extra effort or additional features, the customer may not really want that. From a team member's vantage point in the organization, they may not have enough direct customer insight to make a correct judgment about what's necessary or what should be added. Therefore, it is possible that the customer may not find this new feature worthwhile. It's also possible that if one employee decides independently to add what he thinks is an excellent feature, thinking that it's just a little bit of extra work for him, this can cause problems for someone else in some other part of the project. For project managers dealing with team-member scope creep: yes, you want to allow your team members to shine, you want them to be able to show their technical prowess. That is meaningful to people and it will keep them engaged and wanting to keep working. But there needs to be a formal process to consider all changes to project scope that takes into consideration what it

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will mean to accommodate that change in other parts of the project. The goal is to end up with a very thoughtful decision about whether or not this new feature should be added. And you will also want to know how the customer will respond before you allow the team member to put in the extra work.

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Managing the Creeps

Discussion topic:

You have identified four common types of creep: scope creep, hope creep, effort creep, and team member scope creep.

Create a post in which you respond to the following:

1. Which of these four types of creep have you found to be the most problematic?

2. Offer 1-2 best practices for handling this type of creep. What have you found to be an effective strategy? Which project- management processes do you rely on here?

Instructions:

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Course Project, Part Three: Managing Creep, Scope, and the Unknown

As you have seen in this module (and, no doubt, as you have experienced in your work as a project manager) being able to manage project scope, the different types of creep, and all the questions that may arise from "unknowns," is a huge part of effective project management. You have seen Professor Nozick discuss the challenges and the strategies that exist within great project management. This part of the course project gives you a chance at practical application of what you have learned. You will now create an action plan for yourself. It will guide your efforts on the job as you strive to be more effective in handling some of the tricky demands of project management. Completion of this project is a course requirement.

Instructions:

Download the "Planning and Managing Resources" course project, if you have not already done so. Complete Part Three. Save your work. Click the Submit Assignment button on this page to attach your completed course project document and send it to your instructor for evaluation and credit.

Before you begin:

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Review the grading rubric for this assignment. Please review eCornell's policy regarding plagiarism.

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Module Wrap-up: Manage Scope, the Creeps, and the Unknown

People will fall behind in their tasks or will spend too long trying to make their work more impressive than necessary. Critical resources won't be available for your project when you planned to have them. Customers will ask for more work than was originally agreed to. As the project manager, you can anticipate that similar issues will arise on your projects and can use recommended strategies to address them. In this module, you focused on managing the "creeps": those little changes that accumulate along the way and send projects over time and over budget. You accessed a helpful tool that you can use to get better estimates of how long tasks will actually take. You discussed with your peers the best project management strategies in this area. And you explored what the research says about bringing in more people to help. Brooks' Law, for example, observes that adding person- power to tasks may actually slow down progress instead of accelerating it.

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CEPM502: Planning and Managing Resources Cornell University

Linda K. Nozick Professor and Director

Civil and Environmental Engineering Cornell University

Congratulations on completing "Planning and Managing Resources." I hope you now feel more comfortable integrating resource availability constraints into project planning, scheduling, and control, and that you are ready to consider fast-tracking and crashing to bring late projects back on track. I hope you are in a better position to use effective tools and strategies to serve your projects and your organization.

From all of us at Cornell University and eCornell, thank you for participating in this course.

Sincerely,

Read: Thank You and Farewell

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Linda K. Nozick

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Table Of Contents
Module 1: Flex Schedules and Resources to Your Advantage
Module 2: Use Critical Project Management Tools
Module 3: Manage Scope, Creep, and the Unknown